The salmon were just down there –
Shuddering together, caressing each other,
Emptying themselves for each other –
Now beneath flood-murmur
They curve away deathwards.
January haze,
With a veined yolk of sun. In bone-damp cold
I lean and watch the water, listening to water
Till my eyes forget me
And the piled flow supplants me, the mud blooms
All this ponderous light of everlasting
Collapsing away under its own weight
Mastodon ephemera
Mud-curdling, bull-dozing, hem-twinkling
Caesarean of heaven and earth, unfelt
With exhumations and delirious advents –
Catkins
Wriggle at their mother’s abundance. The spider clings to his craft.
Something else is going on in the river
More vital than death – death here seems a superficiality
Of small scaly limbs, parasitical. More grave than life
Whose reflex jaws and famished crystals
Seem incidental
To this telling – these toilings of plasm –
The melt of mouthing silence, the charge of light
Dumb with immensity,
The river goes on,
Sliding through its place, undergoing itself
In its wheel.
I make out the sunk foundations
Of burst crypts, a bedrock
Time-hewn, time-riven altar. And this is the liturgy
Of the earth’s tidings – harrowing, crowned – a travail
Of raptures and rendings.
Sanctus Sanctus
Swathes the blessed issue.
Perpetual mass
Of the waters
Wells from the cleft.
It is the raw vent
Of the nameless
Teeming inside atoms – and inside the haze
And inside the sun and inside the earth.
It is the font, brimming with touch and whisper,
Swaddling the egg.
Only birth matters
Say the river’s whorls
And the river
Silences everything in a leaf-mouldering hush
Where sun rolls bare, and earth rolls
And mind condenses on old haws.
