She walks these hills in a long black veil, she weeps these tears where the night's winds rail. Dylan. i. After love's betrayal renders its victory, the soul from burning - eventually numbed, thaws to futility and despair: grief with no further murmur dies. ii. Love breathes a breath of flame, and snuffs it out again. iii. Light and dark in unequal inversion replace in reflection earth and sky in refraction. iv. Discourse upon discourse… therein transformation, first kiss of hallucination. v. The branches…bloodshed, blossoms…till all the seas gang dry… vi. Cobwebbed her face spun the spell of lechery on moors. vii. …and if my love nay come then I'll surely find… viii. Fable has it Diana of the woodlands blinds the hunter who inadvertently stumbles upon her whilst bathing. ix. The hunter and the hunted, in the labyrinth he does not know, nor himself from the Minotaur. x. Branches…red…green, returning to roots, a garden of forked paths, a strangler in Eden & the moon alikes memory with her two faces, her eclipses, her solitary ellipses. xi. Day and night tremble on the morning and evening star. xii. The root of my tongue cut back sought your womb, your tenderness, your savageness, utterance beyond the scream in the inward remembering ear. xiii. Dream within dream, a dew drop world, and yet… xiv. More than the mists of heroic immortality, oars on the waves. xv. Cast me that mantle dried on a sunbeam to fetch it home again. xvi. Though the sedge has withered on the bough & the carnivalesque in the bazaar peddles alibis. xvii. Some hours ago it ceased to be the longest day - now a distance immeasurable. Sometimes long, sometimes brief, I pluck a sprig of oak leaf. xviii. After Raferty The Red Man's Wife After great fire Great frost Comes following. La higuera religiosa Trepan, Se enroscan las raíces Errantes. xix. Restless yet beneath the calm. 2) Poisoned Fruit. Even in words quickened by Truth's dark eye: Its absence, whirlpool; its presence, deluge: Its time, astonishment; its magnitude, A murderous dagger point…The Yet Unsayable. R. Graves. i. Today I cast my vote for the greens: let there be an end to all nations, states, governments and religions. It is June and summer's musk makes my heart heavy, my head giddy. Twinned in this way, I tread an emblazoned wood imagining stars must be blood, Searching it, in ruins of a shambled day for the lyric of a word that would release Captivity, but it keeps all, its magic, its secrets and its disappearence. ii. I stand along time with Blake's anvil seed podding an island balm. Haughty she keeps the sky break as the milling throng chorus synthetic refrain celebrating erosion. iii. Morning brings the gulls squall surreal beyond the curtained windows starting faint dawn's debate flighting harsh and sweet. In the darkness a luminous silver disk larger than the moon is undecided whether it leaves or enters. Halfway between infinity, she and I in the mirror. The trees are ivy clad in a laurel bay like a ship mast's rigging sunk to the bottom of the sea floating in its branches. Oh cuidad de los gitanos! Quién te vio y no te recuerda? Dedadla lejos del mar/sin pienes para tus crenchas. Lorca. iv. Guernica. Branches twist into the moon a filament, silver stabs the heart, here, where the unnatural electric light shatters the naked eye, partitioning here and there, and another eye follows me everywhere, inhuman, shedding dream in deathly pallor. Theseus harrows hell having severed the umbilical cord of the Minotaur to be betrayed by history. v. Somewhere in the secret paths of a springland wood a plastic bag spews forth its innards of rags like a desecrated corpse staining the elfin fern with a black sin. Tronchados astroles genitales Pudriéndose Resucitando En tu vagina, Madre India, India niña Empapada de savia, semen, jugos venenos. Paz Nevermore beautiful than now Thou art That until in dread of winter turned black Thou art That. How the midges dance and in a blink gone again! vi. I let the diarrhea pour from my hole, we creatures must come and go. I surmise I am a man, anal abjectio, vagina fear, womb envy, a man. The poet's quest for the primordial womb/man made concrete manifest in nature through the beauty of words. Life goes on made of sand and lammergurian light. 3) The Cave. Coloured rain drops in sheer sleet on the coned cove: harp chords ripple on still waters at lap in the bay. I ascend the troved maze spiraling granite and grass. Green is the colour of the music in twilight omniscience. On the swell of the wave, a white mare in spray: echo and mirage in seen unseen in the lagoon, where mermaids sing. 4) Night's Wood. Tooth clawed, bay spread, dew lapped, pastel sapped chestnut air. Down broom days, damp dark summer spawn, left candlelit room. Midnight's smells, mid summer rain, grey green sheen dews second England, travelling moon hidden. Into black wood, brave as a mouse, still trod mud, nettled branches, fern rusted water light. Panic noised brush, Bird break, a cornered rat; but silent the hill moves slumbering breasted cloud blooded night's music, Removed not vanished, not blown on, no breath of breeze. 5) Fairie Should I woo the stinking skunk or hide beneath the udder gland, land to land? None of us are immune! Though flesh be milk and the bubbles of the day on the silk worm night are clay. ii. Starlings do not turn to Silver bells in Fairieland But migrate beneath the ether. Starlings are not found in paradise, But they throng the city's halls And bleaken its prison walls. 6) Foster on the Loose. His cold will rot beneath the gull's squall' tho' he harsh with eight foot span be beneath the bigger again. Ready for the gone, he could not claw the cat petrified on the vicar's lawn because birds of the air pecked him. Thirty miles a day, on the loose, he now awaits the falconer's noose, across North Anglian plain he skipped vicarage and chimney: But is unlikely to attend the champagne and shrimp sandwich of the vicarage fete. © Robin Ouzman, All Rights Reserved.