sects & schisms

These are the fruits which a dull ease and cessation of our knowledge will bring forth among the people. How goodly, and how to be wisht were such an obedient unanimity as this, what a fine conformity would it starch us all into? doubtles stanch and solid peece of frame-work, as any January could freeze together.

[...]

Methinks I see in my mind a noble and puissant Nation rousing herself like a strong man after sleep, and shaking her invincible locks: Methinks I see her as an Eagle muing her mighty youth, and kindling her undazl'd eyes at the full midday beam; purging and unscaling her long abused sight at the fountain itself of heav'nly radiance; while the whole noise of timorous and flocking birds, with those also that love the twilight, flutter about, amaz'd at what she means, and in their envious gabble would prognosticat a year of sects and schisms.

Milton, "Areopagitica"

words

catarrh
n. - the profuse discharge from nose and eyes which generally accompanies a cold, and which was formerly supposed to run down from the brain; a ‘running at the nose’

fire

Fire devours in front of them, and behind them a flame burns. Before them the land is like the garden of Eden, but after them a desolate wilderness, and nothing escapes them. They have the appearance of horses, and like war-horses they charge. As with the rumbling of chariots, they leap on the top of the mountains, like the crackling of a flame of fire devouring the stubble, like a powerful army drawn up for battle.
Joel 2:3-5

comedy of menace

GOLDBERG: Where is your lechery leading you?
MCCANN: You'll pay for this.
GOLDBERG: You stuff yourself with dry toast.
MCCANN: You contaminate womankind.
GOLDBERG: Why don't you pay the rent?
MCCANN: Mother defiler!
GOLDBERG: Why do you pick your nose?
MCCANN: I demand justice!
GOLDBERG: What's your trade?
MCCANN: What about Ireland?
GOLDBERG: What's your trade?
STANLEY: I play the piano.
GOLDBERG: How many fingers do you use?
STANLEY: No hands!
GOLDBERG: No society would touch you. Not even a building society.
MCCANN: You're a traitor to the cloth.
GOLDBERG: What do you use for pyjamas?
STANLEY: Nothing.
GOLDBERG: You verminate the sheet of your birth.
MCCANN: What about the Albigensenist heresy?
GOLDBERG: Who watered the wicket in Melbourne?
MCCANN: What about the blessed Oliver Plunkett?
GOLDBERG: Speak up, Webber. Why did the chicken cross the road?
STANLEY: He wanted to--he wanted to--he wanted to...
MCCANN: He doesn't know!
GOLDBERG: Why did the chicken cross the road?
STANLEY: He wanted...
MCCANN: He doesn't know. He doesn't know which came first!
GOLDBERG: Which came first?
MCCANN: Chicken? Egg? Which came first?
GOLDBERG AND MCCANN: Which came first? Which came first? Which came first?
Stanley screams.
GOLDBERG: He doesn't know. Do you know your own face?
MCCANN: Wake him up. Stick a needle in his eye.
GOLDBERG: You're a plague, Webber. You're an overthrow.
MCCANN: You're what's left!
GOLDBERG: But we've got the answer to you. We can sterilise you.
MCCANN: What about Drogheda?
GOLDBERG: Your bite is dead. Only your pong is left.
MCCANN: You betrayed our land.
GOLDBERG: You betray our breed.
MCCANN: Who are you, Webber?
GOLDBERG: What makes you think you exist?
MCCANN: You're dead.
GOLDBERG: You're dead. You can't live, you can't think, you can't love. You're dead. You're a plague gone bad. There's no juice in you. You're nothing but an odour.
Silence. They stand over him. He is crouched in the chair. He looks up slowly and kicks Goldberg in the stomach. Goldberg falls. Stanley stands. McCann seizes a chair and lifts it above his head. Stanley seizes a chair and covers his head with it. McCann and Stanley circle.

Harold Pinter, The Birthday Party

hosea

They are all adulterers; they are like a heated oven, whose baker does not need to stir the fire, from the kneading of the dough until it is leavened. On the day of our king the officials became sick with the heat of wine; he stretched out his hand with mockers. For they are kindled like an oven, their heart burns within them; all night their anger smolders; in the morning it blazes like a flaming fire. All of them are hot as an oven, and they devour their rulers. All their kings have fallen; none of them calls upon me.
Hosea 7:5-7, NRSV

For they sow the wind, and they shall reap the whirlwind. The standing grain has no heads, it shall yield no meal; if it were to yield, foreigners would devour it. Israel is swallowed up; now they are among the nations as a useless vessel. For they have gone up to Assyria, a wild ass wandering alone; Ephraim has bargained for lovers.
Hosea 8:7-9, NRSV

Like grapes in the wilderness, I found Israel. Like the first fruit on the fig tree, in its first season, I saw your ancestors. But they came to Baal-peor, and consecrated themselves to a thing of shame, and became detestable like the thing they loved. Ephraim's glory shall fly away like a bird-- no birth, no pregnancy, no conception! Even if they bring up children, I will bereave them until no one is left. Woe to them indeed when I depart from them! Once I saw Ephraim as a young palm planted in a lovely meadow, but now Ephraim must lead out his children for slaughter.
Hosea 9:10-13, NRSV

the dismal science

Nutritional Model: In a relatively poor nation, an increase in the real wage might elevate nutritional and health levels of workers. This will positively affect their physical vigor, mental alertness, and therefore their productivity.

McConnell, Contemporary Labor Economics

hosea

A wind has wrapped them in its wings, and they shall be ashamed because of their altars.
Hosea 4:19, NRSV

They have dealt faithlessly with the LORD; for they have borne illegitimate children. Now the new moon shall devour them along with their fields.
Hosea 5:7, NRSV

sprung

Was anyone there? As when a pike
Strikes, and the line singing writes in lakeflesh
Highstrung runes, and reel spins and mind reels
YES a new and urgent power YES

James Merrill, from The Book of Ephraim

prophets

If I say, "I will not mention him,
or speak any more in his name,"
then within me there is something
like a burning fire
shut up in my bones;
I am weary with holding it in,
and I cannot.

Jeremiah 20:9, NRSV

state of the english church

Sad it is to thinke how that Doctrine of the Gospel, planted by teachers Divinely inspir'd, and by them winnow'd, and sifted, from the chaffe of overdated Ceremonies, and refin'd to such a Spirituall height, and temper of purity, and knowledge of the Creator, that the body, with all the circumstances of time and place, were purifi'd by the affections of the regenerat Soule, and nothing left impure, but sinne; Faith needing not the weak, and fallible office of the Senses, to be either the Ushers, or Interpreters, of heavenly Mysteries, save where our Lord himselfe in his Sacraments ordain'd; that such a Doctrine should through the grossenesse, and blindnesse, of her Professors, and the fraud of deceivable traditions, drag so downwards, as to backslide one way into the Jewish beggery, of old cast rudiments, and stumble forward another way into the new-vomited Paganisme, of sensuall Idolatry, attributing purity, or impurity, to things indifferent, that they might bring the inward acts of the Spirit to the outward, and customary ey-Service of the body, as if they could make God earthly, and fleshly, because they could not make themselves heavenly, and Spirituall: they began to draw down all the Divine intercours, betwixt God, and the Soule, yea, the very shape of God himselfe, into an exterior, and bodily forme, urgently pretending a necessity, and obligement of joyning the body in a formall reverence, and Worship circumscrib'd they hallow'd it, they fum'd it, they sprinkel'd it, they be deck't it, not in robes of pure innocency, but of pure Linnen, with other deformed, and fantastick dresses in Palls, and Miters, gold, and guegaw's fetcht from Arons old wardrope, or the Flamins vestry: then was the Priest set to con his motions, and his Postures his Liturgies, and his Lurries, till the Soule by this meanes of over-bodying her selfe, given up justly to fleshly delights, bated her wing apace downeward: and finding the ease she had from her visible, and sensuous collegue the body in performance of Religious duties her pineons now broken, and flagging, shifted off from her selfe, the labour of high soaring any more, forgot her heavenly flight, and left the dull, and droyling carcas to plod on in the old rode, and drudging Trade of outward conformity.

[...]

what a plump endowment to the many-benefice-gaping mouth of a Prelate, what a relish it would give his canary-sucking, and swan-eating palat, let old Bishop Mountain judge for me.

Milton, Of Reformation

convalescence

Out for a walk, after a week in bed,
I find them tearing up part of my block
And, chilled through, dazed and lonely, join the dozen
In meek attitudes, watching a huge crane
Fumble luxuriously in the filth of years.
Her jaws dribble rubble. An old man
Laughs and curses in her brain,
Bringing to mind the close of The White Goddess.

As usual in New York, everything is torn down
Before you have had time to care for it.
Head bowed, at the shrine of noise, let me try to recall
What building stood here. Was there a building at all?
I have lived on this street for a decade.

Wait. Yes. Vaguely a presence rises
Some five floors high, of shabby stone
--Or am I confusing it with another one
In another part of town, or of the world?--
And over its lintel into focus vaguely
Misted with blood (my eyes are shut)
A single garland sways, stone fruit, stone leaves,
Which years of grit had etched until it thrust
Roots down, even into the poor soil of my seeing.
When did the garland become part of me?
I ask myself, amused almost,
Then shiver once from head to toe,

Transfixed by a particular cheap engraving of garlands
Brought for a few francs long ago,
All calligraphic tendril and cross-hatched rondure,
Ten years ago, and crumpled up to stanch
Boughs dripping, whose white gestures filled a cab,
And thought of neither then nor since.
Also, to clasp them, the small, red-nailed hand
Of no one I can place. Wait. No. Her name, her features

Lie toppled underneath what year's fashion.
The words she must have spoken, setting her face
To fluttering like a veil, I cannot hear now,
Let alone understand.

So that I am already on a stair,
As it were, of where I lived,
When the whole structure shudders at my tread
And soundlessly collapses, filling
The air with motes of stone.
Onto the still erect building net door
Are pressed levels and hues--
Pocked roses, streaked greens, brown whites.
Who drained the pousse-cafe?
Wires and pipes, snapped off at the roots, quiver.

Well, that is what life does. I stare
A moment longer, so. And presently
The massive volume of the world
Closes again.

Upon that book I swear
To abide by what it teaches:
Gospels of ugliness and waste,
Of towering voids, of soiled gusts,
Of a shrieking to be faced
Full into, eyes astream with cold--

With cold?
All right, then. With self-knowledge.

Indoors at last, the pages of Times are apt
to open, and the illustrated mayor of New York,
Given a glimpse of how and where I work,
To note yet one more house that can be scrapped.

Unwillingly I picture
My walls weathering in the general view.
It is not even as though the new
Buildings did very much for architecture.

Suppose they did. The sickness of our time requires
That these as well be blasted in their prime.
You would think the simple fact of having lasted
Threatened our cities like mysterious fires.

There are certain phrases which to use in a poem
Is like rubbing silver with quicksilver. Bright
But facile, the glamour deadens overnight.
For instance, how "the sickness of our time"

Enhances, then debases, what I feel.
At my desk I swallow in a glass of water
No longer cordial, scarcely wet, a pill
They had told me not to take until much later.

With the result that back into my imagination
The city glides, like cities seen from the air,
Mere smoke and sparkle to the passenger
Having in mind another destination

Which now is not that honey-slow descent
of the Champs-Elysees, her hand in his,
But the dull need to make some kind of house
Out of the life lived, out of the love spent.

James Merrill, "An Urban Convalescence"

muddledom

from LXIII

[...] I’m
myself close to the inarticulate. Commonplace
muddledom I grant, extraordinary
common goodness being its twin. I think
of others on such evenings, long forgotten,
placing new flowers in the cemetery;
a sycamore’s disproportionate
summer heaviness, engorged with shadow,
yew-bark, its waning glow, fulvous as sandstone;
empurpled bronzing: highlighted,
the beech’s massive casque. Such grace
dispeopled, do not ask too much of it,
heart’s fulness troubled by its own repose.
But is this asking too much, of nature
and of relationship, of kind? Yes,
to be blunt: eloquence moving
bad conscience forward, backward, across,
like a metal detector.

Geoffrey Hill, "The Orchards of Syon"

cops

3.
Tall Negro girls from Chicago
Listen to light songs.
They know when the supposed patron
is a plainclothesman.
A cop's palm is a roach dangling down the scorched fangs
of a light bulb.
The soul of a cop's eyes
is an eternity of Sunday daybreak in the suburbs
of Juarez, Mexico.

James Wright, "The Minneapolis Poem"

words

cicatrice
n. - the scar of a healed wound; scar on the bark of a tree.

obeisance

Also the word of the LORD came to me, saying, “Son of man, behold, I take away from you the desire of your eyes with one stroke; yet you shall neither mourn nor weep, nor shall your tears run down. Sigh in silence, make no mourning for the dead; bind your turban on your head, and put your sandals on your feet; do not cover your lips, and do not eat man’s bread of sorrow.”
So I spoke to the people in the morning, and at evening my wife died; and the next morning I did as I was commanded.

Ezekiel 24:15-18, NKJV

words

salvo
n. - saving clause; a provision that a certain engagement or ordinance shall not be binding where it would interfere with a specified right or obligation
n. - dishonest mental reservation; a quibbling evasion; a consciously bad excuse
n. - an expedient for saving (a person's reputation) or soothing (offended pride, conscience)
n. - simultaneous discharge of artillery or other firearms, whether with hostile intent or otherwise

words

girn
n. - a snare or trap for catching animals or birds, made of hair, wire, or the like, with a running noose
v. - to show the teeth in rage, pain, disappointment, etc.; to snarl as a dog; to complain persistently; to be fretful or peevish. Also to girn at. Now only north. and Sc.

words

lixiviation
n. - the action or process of separating a soluble substance from one that is insoluble by the percolation of water, as salts from wood ashes

words

judder
v. - to shake violently, esp. of the mechanism in cars, cameras, etc.; also of the voice in the singing, to oscillate between greater and less intensity

state of the english church

Blind mouthes! that scarce themselves know how to hold
A Sheep-hook, or have learn'd ought els the least
That to the faithfull Herdmans art belongs!
What recks it them? What need they? They are sped;
And when they list, their lean and flashy songs
Grate on their scrannel Pipes of wretched straw,
The hungry Sheep look up, and are not fed

John Milton, "Lycidas"

words

sedge
n. - a name for various coarse grassy, rush-like or flag-like plants growing in wet places; also (in different localities) variously applied, spec., e.g. to the cyperaceous genera Carex and Cladium, to the Sweet Flag (Acorus) and the Wild Iris (Iris Pseudacorus)

words

espalier
n. - a kind of lattice-work or frame-work of stakes upon which fruit trees or ornamental shrubs are trained; also the stakes individually; a fruit-tree trained on such, usually of woodwork, or on stakes

words

spoor
n. - the trace, track, or trail of a person or animal, esp. of wild animals pursued as game

similes

I remember the work in him
Like bitterness in persimmons before a frost.

Frank Stanford, "Riverlight"

story

Then Mrs. Lambert was alone in the kitchen. She sat down by the window and turned down the wick of the lamp, as she always did before blowing it out, for she did not like to blow out a lamp that was still hot. When she thought the chimney and shade had cooled sufficiently she got up and blew down the chimney. She stood a moment irresolute, bowed forward with her hands on the table, before she sat down again. Her day of toil over, day dawned on other toils within her, on the crass tenacity of life and its diligent pains. Sitting, moving about, she bore them better than in bed. From the well of this unending weariness her sigh went up unendingly, for day when it was night, for night when it was day, and day and night, fearfully, for the light she had been told about, and told she could never understand, because it was not like those she knew, not like the summer dawn she knew would come again, to her waiting in the kitchen, sitting up straight on the chair, or bowed down over the table, with little sleep, little rest, but more than in her bed. Often she stood up and moved about the room, or out and round the ruinous old house. Five years now it had been going on, five or six, not more. She told herself she had a woman’s disease, but half-heartedly. Night seemed less night in the kitchen pervaded with the everyday tribulations, day less dead. It helped her, when things were bad, to cling with her fingers to the worn table at which her family would soon be united, waiting for her to serve them, and to feel about her, ready for use, the lifelong pots and pans. She opened the door and looked out. The moon had gone, but the stars were shining. She stood gazing up at them. It was a scene that had sometimes solaced her. She went to the well and grasped the chain. The bucket was at the bottom, the wind-lass locked. So it was. Her fingers strayed along the sinuous links. Her mind was a press of formless questions, mingling and crumbling limply away. Some seemed to have to do with her daughter, that minor worry, now lying sleepless in her bed, listening. Hearing her mother moving about, she was on the point of getting up and going down to her. But it was only the next day, or the day after, that she decided to tell her what Sapo had told her, namely that he was going away and would not come back. Then, as people do when someone even insignificant dies, they summoned up such memories as he had left them, helping one another and trying to agree. But we all know that little flame and its flickerings in the wild shadows. And agreement only comes a little later, with the forgetting.

Samuel Beckett, Malone Dies

rhythms

Personally of course I regret everything. Not a word, not a deed, not a thought, not a need, not a grief, not a joy, not a girl, not a boy, not a doubt, not a trust, not a scorn, not a lust, not a hope, not a fear, not a smile, not a tear, not a name, not a face, no time, no place, that I do not regret, exceedingly. An ordure, from beginning to end. And yet, when I sat for Fellowship, but for the boil on my bottom...The rest an ordure. The Tuesday scowls, the Wednesday growls, the Thursday curses, the Friday howls, the Saturday snores, the Sunday yawns, the Monday morns, the Monday morns. The whacks, the moans, the cracks, the groans, the welts, the squeaks, the belts, the shrieks, the pricks, the prayers, the kicks, the tears, the skelps, and the yelps. And the poor old lousy old earth, my earth and my father's and my mother's [...] An excrement. The crocuses and the larch turning green every year a week before the others and the pastures red with uneaten sheep's placentas and the long summer days and the newmown hay and the wood-pigeon in the morning and the cuckoo in the afternoon and the corncrake in the evening and the wasps in the jam and the smell of the gorse and the look of the gorse and the apples falling and the children walking in the dead leaves and the larch turning brown a week before the others and the chestnuts falling and the howling winds and the sea breaking over the pier and the first fires and the hooves on the road and the consumptive postman whistling The Roses Are Blooming in Picardy and the standard oil-lamp and of course the snow and to be sure the sleet and bless your hear the slush and every fourth year the February debacle and the endless April showers and crocuses and then the whole bloody business starting all over again. A turd. And if I could begin it all over again, knowing what I know now, the result would be the same. And if I could begin again a third time, knowing what I know then, the result would be the same. And if I could begin it all over again a hundred times, knowing each time a little more than the time before, the result would always be the same, and the hundredth life as the first, and the hundred lives as one. A cat's flux. But at this rate we shall be here all night.

Samuel Beckett, Watt

words

marl
n. - an earthy deposit, typically loose and unconsolidated and consisting chiefly of clay mixed with calcium carbonate, formed in prehistoric seas and lakes and long used to improve the texture of sandy or light soil; a calcareous deposit found at the bottom of present-day lakes and rivers, composed of the remains of aquatic plants and animals.
n. - a mottled yarn made from two or more differently coloured threads twisted together; fabric produced from such yarn.
v. - to catch in a snare, put in a noose, entangle.
v. - to marinate or souse (fish).
v. - to fasten with marline or small line; to secure together by a succession of half hitches; to wind a line or cord around (a parcelled rope), typically securing it with a hitch at each turn.

* marline
n. - light rope of two strands, used esp. for binding larger ropes. Also more generally: strong cord or waxed twine.

'And he directed his play to show the fun of unhappiness'

NELL (without lowering her voice): Nothing is funnier than unhappiness, I grant you that. But--
NAGG (shocked): Oh!
NELL: Yes, yes, it's the most comical thing in the world. And we laugh, we laugh, with a will, in the beginning. But it's always the same thing. Yes, it's the funny story we have heard too often, we still find it funny, but we don't laugh any more.
(Pause.)
Have you anything else to say to me?
NAGG: No.

Samuel Beckett, Endgame

bodies

If in some smothering dreams, you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Bitten as the cud
Of vile,

Wilfred Owen, "Dulce et Decorum Est"

bodies

Cotter thinks he sees a path to the turnstile on the right. He drains himself of everything he does not need to make the jump. Some are still jumping, some are thinking about it, some need a haircut, some have girlfriends in woolly sweaters and the rest have landed in the ruck and are trying to get up and scatter. A couple of stadium cops are rumbling down the ramp. Cotter sheds these elements as they appear, sheds a thousand waves of information on his skin. His gaze is trained on the iron bars projected from the post. He picks up speed and seems to lose his gangliness, the slouchy funk of hormones and unbelonging and all the stammering things that seal his adolescence. He is just a running boy, a half-seen figure from the streets, but the way running reveals some clue of being, the way a runner bares himself to consciousness, this is how the dark-skinned kid seems to open to the world, how the bloodrush of a dozen strides bring him into eloquence.

Don Delillo, Underworld

chiasmus

XX

The lonely mountains o’er,
And the resounding shore,
A voice of weeping heard and loud lament;
Edgèd with poplar pale,
From haunted spring, and dale
The parting Genius is with sighing sent;
With flower-inwoven tresses torn
The Nymphs in twilight shade of tangled thickets mourn.

John Milton, "On the Morning of Christ's Nativity"

sex

“endlessly making an end to things”
- Celan

I must have left a fingerprint, a molecule of oil,

a seal, a slick when I took my hands away

from her throat—the way she liked in loving

to have her pearls exchanged for the torque

of my fingers and so kill her eminence for a second.

The queen is dead. Long live the queen. The evidence

was volatile, was fugitive, was a story told

in menstrual blood and glycerines, Chanel and boss

sauce. It failed in the telling to be events

and sequence, the spell of water and bridge, and became

rain and distance, the first faint smell of rose

dismembering, masking the rigor mortis of the coyotes.

I took my hands away as from the child

sleeping or from the hot stove, and I was no longer I.

I saw the sky in the windshield of another city.

The sky an empty karate studio, the sky Route 95.

Because she saw herself everywhere,

The sky a fugue, the folds of a gown where the dragons are.

there could be no other. A film was her darling,

the sky Artists’ Supplies, the sky six-thirty darkening.

a mirror of her hair—fixed or deranged

Sky of correspondences, the color of G minor, the taste of gray.

She thought, from the audience: I should be up there.

February sky a copy center, relocated elsewhere.

I loved to go out into the audience, the bebopist said,

and walk in the crowd to feel

what they feel. Jumping down from the bandstand, I

broke my foot, lay there, had to blare it from my back.

The sky nineteenth-century smoke, the sky a drum,

then here comes the bass solo.

Vote Hoffa, the sky says, labor sky, the dollar soaring with the yen.

The sky popularized, blue-red, the access and the factory.

I take myself to the movies—the romance of sheets,

the dustup of things and her magnificent face: stylish,

the sky inside her eyes, chlorine and glass.

I tithe to the darkness and I’m glad for the dark

two hours where I undo her, where I remember the eye

I indulged, the opposite of sacrifice, the lamb’s throat

uncut, the woolly body kindled in the green

like a dream of Lorca’s, betrayed in the telling.

The sky Repairables, the sky Pony Rides.

Some nights in the house by the river, I walked out

into a collective dream of home—an overstory

overlooking a body of water—where I found

the horse like smoke or luck, a muscled earth, an avatar,

and I held him, face to flank, and felt the skeleton

under the skin and the fear of the human touched back

by hunger. The great white eye another moon.

It was a lesser and a greater form of the feeling

after fucking, if it has a form, if its past is present.

Sky an empty shelf in the Salvation Army Thrift Store.

A few fine hairs like her lashes on my hands

The sky a white peony, the sky a paper life.

when I came back and found her bound in the sheets,

the opposite of spectacle, not absorbing the gaze but

giving off light like night water, giving back the gorgeous

I had inscribed there, a fallen form, small, fursheen, film

still, a body suddenly small enough to fill a tear duct.

The sky a shell, a lull in the shelling.

What was it like, the loving? Like Sarajevo

under siege, no electricity, no gas, no water,

and yet the dance goes on in which a bathtub is filled,

and, although the theater is twenty degrees, the dancer

of the god-kissed tendons for her finale

jumps into it—the leap that takes away the breath

and rations it to everyone, and

it’s the only bath for anyone in two months.

The sky orchestra and karma, the sky Gold Bought and Sold.

The windows of the house I won’t live in held light

and the island fires on the river, held hawk and heron.

Under siege in dream, the panes slash my face when they shatter

with difference, inside, outside, with distance, what was

not. A second dream: kids go by on bikes and big wheels,

their faces grown up and disfigured, scabbed,

hydrocephalic with sadness. Finally the whole body

The sky a gray whale, the sky magnanimous and cruel.

and not just its parts, wants to be unloved, beginning

The sky Purgatory Road, the sky a god mouth, a crow.

with its parts, the fetish of her: a cell from the lining,

spit, a follicle, the thousand ships of her face,

the torso and ratio, rib whittle, unbound feet, beginning

to become vast, nothing you can touch, a taste,

The sky a copper pot blackened, picked clean of puchero.

a smell, familiar and far away, unlocked by thaw,

feral and essential, like a language lost, like night

illuminated by the night.

Bruce Smith, "February Sky"

'the power-and-beauty mob has my bequest'

III

Not to skip detail, such as finches brisking
on stripped haw-bush;
the watered gold that February drains
out of the overcast; nomadic aconites
that in their trek recover beautifully
our sense of place,
the snowdrop fettled on its hinge, waxwings
becoming sportif in the grimy air.

IV

I accept, now, we make history; it's not some
abysmal power,
though making it kills us as we die to loss.
What lives is the arcane; by our decision
a lifetime's misdirection and atrophy
of some renown
or else nothing; the menagerie
of tinnitus crowding a deaf man's skull
has more to say. Woman's if you so rule.
It's gibberish
we bend to or are balked by on the spot,
treatise untreatised and the staring eyes.
The windflower has more stamina to fail,
the Lent lily,
the autumn crocus with its saffron fuse,
all that we fancy and make music of,
like Shakespeare's metaphors for governance,
nature itself
brought in to conserve polity; hives of gold
proclaim a gift few of us can afford.

Geoffrey Hill, "A Précis or Memorandum of Civil Power"

words

urim
n. - certain objects, the nature of which is not known, worn in or upon the ‘breast-plate’ of the Jewish high-priest, by means of which the will of Jehovah was held to be declared.