Mother halo

Containing all that halo, I slide – your ghost in and out of my time / your signature upset
drum-riff upbeat,
caught, bird, song-drum
   stopped.
Containing all that fear, I slide, unconscious into your waiting arms
these lines a blessing, neutered by peace,
uplifted by song
grace / named / plenty / rich / only
this will
do.
Containing all that plenty,
the corn slipped like silk through the net of sheaves
in green sunlight orange-warm, petal yellow.
Drums again.
Sickening awful doubt.
Plenty looms, plentiful doom.
Only the angels can fix it.
Fix it.
Angels quick as dust to settle on this mind-swept empty place.

Containing all that halo, you slip unnoticed / noticed / parked in an only zone
only the lonely only park here.
Your angel’s slipping
your halo, your halo.
Felt charged.
Night called birds to its side,
bid them dwell in the forest near the lake
where heaven fell each dawn,
each sunrise.

Your halo slipped its mask off, your halo.
You wore a worried look.

Your halo, though, glows,
strong,

soft heavy metallic bangle of a thing
no jewel
light as a silk scarf wrapped round my soul
to keep me from falling
into
into
significance
Because the significant thing is this:
only Peter knows the list at the Gate of Dawn whom to let in,
whose plate is full
and whose worn halo is worth
holding onto
that long
now.
Shalom.

O mechanical day

O mechanical day,
you beat your metal hard rhythm
all over my flesh.
Your calabash almost breaks
as you smash water into its mouth,
as you drink.

O mechanical day,
you swallow my hours of labour
and pay me in starlings.
You slide my life works into a drawer
and label me sick, ailing, dead.
I cannot wake them.

O mechanical day,
I will escape your blades
slip past your leather hoops
and hide myself among your heaps of metal
vast piles of scrap metal
gathered for wars,
heaped here
in their ossified state
with their butterfly patterns of rust
glowing green
in the dark.

 
Before the coming of colourless day

Before the coming of colourless day
and the noise of pink-clothed consumers of bread,
wind.
It blows away a pattern of leaves,
a sermon in itself,
beside this stone path
at the side of the grave.
Dry leaf,
yellow, green-stemmed, turning
brown, parachuted here, frost-bitten
adding its tiny grasshopper rasp sounds to the day dry as bark.
I stopped to touch
the sere leaf
in my hollowed hands,
resisted the temptation
to crush it into dust
with my Midas fingers.