Saint poem -- the single italicised word I've put within asterisks.
Sources for the poem were R.D. Laing's 'Divided Self', Scorsese's
film 'The Last temptation of Christ', Castaneda's 'Journey to
Ixtlan', and, latterly, the painting of the same name by Hieronymous
Bosch. Along with a weird chunk of real life . . . .
THE TEMPTATION OF SAINT ANTHONY
And this thing dare I soothly say:
If that he were God veray,
Hunger shold greeve hym by no way;
That were against reason.
Chester 12:
Butchers
1
Fire came down. A snap. A click.
The opening and shutting of a beak.
Lightning fertilized the ground -
and so, baptized, I quit the world
to fathom God: a wilderness
lay waiting to admit my flesh.
I saw the desert scorpion, black,
fully armoured, dusting up sand
as it scuttled from under a stone, sting
erect and itching for small prey.
Whatever I turned my mind to, hatched.
For six days I fed upon the sky.
2
There is a natural surrender:
knives in a glass of clear water,
all broken by light, yet still whole.
In God's grace I break my will.
And there, upon a groaning table,
animal breeds animal
eats animal, in bloody shifts -
wolves, livestock, flycatchers, flies,
the endless mauled sacrifice.
Creator Spiritus, what *is* this.
I make a circle here, and sit.
On brutal earth, on earth as it is -
3
The sun works on my mouth.
In prayer, words turn and taste sour.
All sense has fallen to one fact:
circulating in the blood-stream's net
a splinter of the Cross, its course
fixed blind upon my central heart.
Fever holds me high in its wings.
You my companion, architect of shadows,
tell me what appetite will serve. I know.
Your eyes are a hornets' nest of light.
The sun shakes its yellow rings.
A thorn-tree buds with gold coins.
4
The stars' mill-wheel shone.
Without warning this clear vision -
A ploughed moonlit field, a man
by jackals torn to radiance
Bone-meal, grist, immortal soul
all fuel the furnace of the Cross
*
The desert dimmed. Rocks gave way
to gathering voices I knew and loved;
at one, delivered back to the world,
I found it very much the same.
I know the cities and their names.
A host of horn-billed angels sing.
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