I
Old ghosts have my blood
New ghosts tear it in accord
And was my best that smiling one
Who lent me board and bed?
Who fed the horse on carrot tops
Who put the mare in poor Tom’s bunk
Who stood the cabinets of the dead,
The famous beside the good,
Side by side like tenements
In the criss-cross wood?
Dark has shown that the least light moves
On the surface of the thing
And birds have played with the unicorn
When Jesus hung in the blue glass pane
Or was it a cry in the red bush
That broke the liquid ring?
Over the stiles of many bones
I stumbled and bruised a shin,
No worse than a widow eating tears
Or an old man stealing flowers
From one dead soul for another one.
A brawl of ghosts in the tombs
Where the shut-eyed angels stand
Assisting with their wings, you’d think,
Dead bodies in their wounds
To wake from rotting houses and rank chains
And by the diamond teeth of files
To saw the marble through like sand
And arise from long captivity
To the breath of dazzling God.
Then who will take these hanged bones down?
And must I wrestle with
What fought the heart to a standstill late and long
Since I was crossed with water in the wood?
Angels who stand in air by wings
Swallow-tailed or rainbow-foiled
Peacock-eyed or moth-dappled
Angels who stand in air, come down
Let that light come up, that dark
In the middle of a wood
Of sentry shapes, sedan chairs,
Follies of gothic stone,
Let widow’s tears mix with the sand
And weeds they pull from off a name
And lime, sand and water build a frame
By love and myth and toil that ties
To intercross a paradise.
II
That lion of the scalloped curls,
Guardian of the early dead,
Precedes the angel, lounging there
Upon the stone tomb bed.
Heroic though he be
It was imagination wed
The yoked flesh and bird
And tenderly did cross
Wings with curious host
Who in us lives and feeds
The myth of our estate much lost.
Ghosts that stand me in bad stead
Brawling in the wood
I have seen angels hold
Cups of some most carved degree
To catch there at the side
The poor wine of the wound.
Owl-eyed with charity they hung
Treading on air in a wind.
What rough heart but the wildest one
That ever gently sang
Eked this out and painted it
And put the skull at the tree’s root
And let a lizard laugh therein
(Scurrying tongue of the thing)
And ribbed the blood in trinity
Down the round, bony dome.
But if that spirit then assert
The scarecrow on the tree
Or puts his effigy in wax
Under glass and molds his agony-
Lips wide in sculptured breath torn wild
And blood in ribs and pleats of dark design
Beneath the loin cloth, on the side-
Then let him call those angels round,
Cupbearers to the wound.
Call for that notion, bless its wit
(Did not the Greeks first think of it?
Who gave the great horseback his wings
And to another fins for hooves
And a fish-skinned tail,)
Call on these in a wood
For resurrection from the void.
If ghosts will heed the angels in a cloud
With the noise of waters beating wings
Until the wings let down?
III
For crosses get chimeras
In the quandary wood.
Apocalyptic beast upon a tower
Triumphal clawing at the air,
The winds of doctrine blow
Dead airs up and down
The long light of avenues
Sunk and slant with centuries
Knee-knelt, foot-stumbled, worn
That kept a god within
And how is the mystery fled?
Passion without the faith
That the light spilt or the death.
IV
It is still in the missaled wood.
Recumbent in their vines
Lie the formal effigies
To which kind figures lean
That will not rise again.
Owl faces sculptured, disks and dials,
A gilded dome, a cobwebbed stone,
Widows in their garb of weeds
With priest-like tears by unkempt urn
Leaf-burners, nuns, the solitary
Who nudge the moss from toppling stone
Or leave the flower at house unknown
With rusty door or door unhinged or gone.
Blown in cape and mobled black
Like fragments from a broken light
They veer unfledged, bare-shouldered, backed
Up and down impulsive dark
In the dark that nothing knows
Bound to the humors of the wheel.
While the scarecrow on the tree. …
That breath torn wild. Those crackling thorns.
Pathetic myth. Borne agony
As everlasting as the damned
Howling in porches of the memory.
Until the rough heart comprehends
Caught in the thicket of the flesh
Ghosts must howl and wheel must whirl
Nor trumpets lift their mouths they say.
Eye of the wound in the hand
And in the side with purple lid.
Death’s poll and spots on the bent head. …
V
Then creatures of the swallow-tailed
Moth-dappled, peacock-eyed
Long wings held back in docile train
Break rank, brave order, and come down.
Else get a horse with dragon bird.
That saint’s head tucked beneath an arm
Put a beast’s head where there’s none.
Flayed gods who hang by their hands and smile,
Perseus with his sword,
Heroes in whose hollow eyes
All light and shadow’s mixture lies,
Get us back our elder gods
Lest when every god is dead
None but the demons reign.
Sortileges hydra-headed,
Abstrusities so fine
They are opaque as central gold
That cannot be that beaten thin,
Compound your mysteries in the wood
Until we join from fibres, membranes
Of all broken things, bundles of
Curiosities, inscrutables, invisibles,
All multitudes summed up to one
What beats a passage through the wood.
Come beasts, come ghosts, come angels, dance
In the medley wood.
Dance until a battle’s done
And the bird has fished at dawn.
Essences that ruled
In the spectacle of things
Take no sides but gather round
Till the spectacle is known
Down to those horned deities
And those so wrought from lion, bird
That if they are not spirits, they
Partake of much transparency
Down to those long-stemmed gold horns
Blowing out to fields near where
The tranced dance in green orchards
To nimbus shores where the gay blest stand
Tier on tier where they sing
Above the long night of the dead.
Down to all things in the wood
All rough heart’s allegory
In its thorn and bryony
All vision’s fury that gets done
Only when a roof is spanned
And voices stifled sing again
Of light that runs a race mile round.
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