War of the Beasts and the Animals

The earth’s middle class: dead and still unresurrected.

M

And poetry speaks and knows what it says: I said

You are gods, I said, and all of you are children of the most High

But you shall die like fools:

Like one of the princes and generals

(politicians and aristocrats

and representatives of the swelling bourgeoisie)

Like mortals

Like nothing could be easier

Than the falling and the falling apart.

You die all the time

Like it was a normal thing to do.

Why don’t you take yourselves in hand?

Why don’t you make an effort,

Says poetry from under the ground, breathing through the hollow reeds.

L

Glory glory let’s gather up this man

(scrape up the body like a lump of strawberry jam)

An eternal flame burns, it consumes the fallen

The unconsidered, undiscovered, the gone-before

Don’t give up your cells to fire, your forty thousand cells

Or your nerve endings, or the fine nets of capillary walls

The ribbed palate, the pelvic down, the dusty pelvic floor

The slight partitions between the mind and ear

How will we gather them for Judgment Day?

Your bones didn’t know they would be saved.

Sacks of seed, everything the body consumed

Iron – in our age becomes part of the exhumed

Body parts parts of another’s body, which has lain here since another age

Together they make a new body

A not-yet-existent person.

K

Poetry, a many-eyed absurd

Nature of manymouths

Found in many bodies at the same time

Having lived in many other bodies before that

And now lying in confinement

Like something about to be born

(But at any moment an expedition of archaeologists

a curious shepherd

a dozen students in shorts

might pull you from the earth,

prematurely, not carried to full term,

and stick their fingers in your toothless gob)

Judging by the phosphorus content in the bone

English-speaking Poetry had a diet of fish.

J

They said, and it was confirmed by a graduate of the Theological

Institute, who quoted a doctoral thesis in support:

We will be resurrected as thirty-three-year-olds

Even those who died aged seventy or aged nine.

The body will know how to be resurrected

This is the body’s privilege:

To eat and drink what it wants

To wander footsore many stadia

To wear upon its skin clothes, wounds, tears

To walk in water and evaporate into the air

To remain unrecognised, to make itself recognised

To resemble a gardener,

A wanderer,

Itself and someone else,

To roast fish on a spit for friends

To rise to heaven and be seated on the right hand of God

As befits the son.

I

Lying on that table

I hear the faint sound of a vacuum cleaner

I feel the breeze on the far edge of my body.

And everything that was in me stands tall like an army

On the very border with air

As if we could still begin a war, and lose it again.

Quick, and then slow

Like a clever dog, first it tilts its head

Then it understands, and it runs to you

So the soul probes its own housing

Curls up inside, the lining of crumbling faded velvet,

Or strokes its leathery lid.

Under the black-and-blue clouds, baroque-sombre

You are reconstituted

Like fish on a fishmonger’s slab,

Your bones, your muscles – picked apart

By a doctor’s prized thumbs

And there you lie, dumb.

H

In an English book

A woman, exhausted by labour pains

And ready to slip out of life, as one might slip through a gate

Is exhorted by another woman to never yield!

An effort, she says, is necessary.

This woman talks in the third person

As if she were discussing the heroine in a novel

Which she could yet be

If only she would rouse herself,

And not run away or release her grip

Show the weakness of her sex.

This is a world of effort, this woman explains.

We must never yield when so much depends on us.

The unheroine makes an uncourageous effort

Trickles

(like underground water through a sieve)

Attaches herself to the dead

Her own body a tessera

Between dead white men

G

Break the frozen earth,

Touch the dead song

Part her chalken lips

Touch with your finger

The bony tubers of tooth.

In one of those dark, underground passageways

An observant little girl finds

What she should never have found:

Large, impossible to avoid

Taking up all the breathing space,

And just to pass along the passage

(running, eyes tight shut)

She now has to push her way through:

A body – someone’s – has consumed all the space,

Frozen solid, dead, no one’s body now.

Wings pressed tightly

Beak and claws drawn in

Damp-downed, eyelids shut

Kiss its transparent feathers:

Swallow, I believe, help thou my unbelief.

And suddenly she heard a tiny flutter in the swallow’s breast:

A faint beat at first, but then louder and louder.

The swallow’s heart had started beating again.

The swallow wasn’t dead, merely stunned from the cold

And now it had been warmed and come back to life.

F

No,

Not the way they sinned

But the way their flesh greened and their curls loosened.

No, not the way it hardens