Clarity

Obora Hvezda

When on the tram I can remember nothing

And the soil enlarged.

Crawling to a mean distemper

Trying to be heard.

Roads on runners

tyres on craters

feet on feet

and angry corners

Standing at the slamming upspring

Dust and muck and charge.

Trying to recall earth by song

Hearing just a slipping pier.

How do we know with nothing growing?

How do we hear with concrete showing?

In which ash-ache

does bliss benevolent

scarlet banner

bones

come near?

I score along the highway

To keep myself alive.

Markets high recall to me

Nothing I have known.

They are not skin or wood or wild

They are not friend or bone.

I slink into the forest

I scrabble quick, woodwise

Is there a wisdom in footknots?

Nothing we've not yet tried.

So laugh at me among up-bones

In sky all wired and wide.

My hands raw into snow hoops

for months they recognize

October to December

slash searing blue and night wide.

in whispers

fear lessens

oak trees outface lies.

It could be blessing or ending.

It could be a prayer or a blizzard

Yet I remember the footnotes

Your berries the colour of blood.

and I remember the endnotes

irreproachable thunder of lace

on the faces

of rivers

and stones.

That recall the places

I transgressed to know.

ice-dilated sight.

the exorbitant light.

Forests and monsters

Are awake at night.

The night they're awake in

Is one that I knew

a faultless white thunder

of rain sloping stars

a looming

an easing

coalescing

of prayers

and wolves with blue faces

who stare

and repair.

(Do you recall, when the moon comes,

We'll be told as we go on our way?

And we'll all have a way to be told on?

And we'll all know a rhyme at the end of the day?)

Snow creeks

Madness lessens

slopes off to its hearth

surrounded by those

that attended its birth

the valleys of crystal

the caverns of trees

the keening white branches

the swamp squandered leaves.

the berries all roistered

the eagle up high

the cloak of the piglet

the glistening sky.

I can shut my eyes in the forest

of lies

for the lies and the truth

are both under the roof

of the blue and black sky

and the stunning of ice.

and I wander through holes

in dim-darkening ground

and the woodsmen around me

do not make a sound

and beneath my eyelids

I can see the snow

and the berries that stain

and the holly that grows

and the urgency outside

is that which I meet

with the silence of blackness

I feel with my feet.

(Do you recall, when the moon comes,

We'll gather and toast at the port?

And we'll know the port that we stand on?

And we'll know the colour of pearls and of thought?)

I can shut my eyes in the forest

and witness the whitening trees

the branches that kindle the torrent

the opening and closing of leaves.

Eyes closed see the same as eyes open.

Black wooden pillars and tender white lakes.

Webbing of roots and a wide solar sky

A high star-stone building, white red and awake.

Little Red Forest Girl

Walking to Granny's

Walks away from the path.

The snow suspended,

The trees reply

The wolf responds

The black birds cry.

Is it your blood that I see on the snow?

Did you start the palace which promised to grow?

Is it your name that the rowan recalls?

Is it your bone house where snow softly falls?

Little Red Forest Girl

Outbrave the hunter

Cut nothing down

But what figures your crown.

I walk in the forest

and walk to be free

Oh red forest girl

Recall me to me.

No listless absenting

No smell of escape

You walk in the forest

In the forest you wait.

The dawn is denatured

Outside in the dust

But here in the woodland

I know that it must

- Come, when the wind rises

and when the sun speaks.

When berries are broken

their bodies decree

the lustrous of waking

the forcing of rivers

in woods I believe

that our thoughts are repeated

by swollen encounters

and glistening snow.

In trees I remember

The places I go.