Grey Rose

I.

Certain repetitions are unavoidable. They can be excised, but they arise.

And so it comes to this moment, that a woman is dying.

She has a name, for a name is given even unto a horse

or a slave or a kitten.

We will call her "Grey Rose."

She was born.

Now on this her bed of death, she coughs. She coughs.

It is said that at the moment of death, that the most pure light

floods into consciousness like lava on a barren mountainside,

moves across the sky like a bolt of lightning that sets trees ablaze.

It is said that we see all the most beautiful moments of our lives

before we depart.

II.

Grey Rose was wincing on her knees

and her eyes were closed tightly,

her head inclined to the left.

The man standing above her was violent and her lover,

her love. In his right hand was a stainless steel folding spade.

Black paint was on it, to one degree or another.

He struck her just above her right ear and the steel sheared

and she fell and she shook twice there on the floor.

She tried to rise. Her hands scrabbled on the wet floor.

She fell again. The blood from her head flowed down the heartwood

of the pines. He stepped over her and opened the refrigerator. He grabbed

two glass bottles of beer with his right hand.

Later she would remember reading something about head wounds.

Something about fistfights or flashlights. Her blood was in her mouth

and the spade had been left on the ground and where it had tasted her skull

it had once only been the color of silver but then shared space with red.

She laughed til it turned to a cough. She had recalled an ancient truism

first said by a marauding Goth to a priest of the Roman tradition:

-Father, how does one wash blood from gold taken in holy conquest?

-My Son, I do not know of a way.

-Father, your ignorance is of no great importance. Gold does not bear stains.

III.

It was that particular pine heartwood floor that she saw most, in her final moments.

There were other unpleasant things, and they should perhaps not be downplayed.

-The first marriage to the violent man,

how she had sought his hand again

twenty years after her first pain and divorce,

and because of this, tasted her life on pine

while the folding shovel sat quietly

-Children she loved the way that peasant women love the loaves

that are beaten before the baking.

Her grandchildren who had mothers just the same

-The hazy way that her head felt like a sunset in a modern age,

after coal had had its way

IV.

The slight realization that property is owned occurs. The children arrive.

Her house is owned, and in her name. After her passing, it cannot be the same.

Some few thousand dollars exist in one or more savings accounts, no doubt,

even if not remembered.

Her grandson has been hurt very badly by many people

and he has hands like gnarled iron and he has never cried and will not cry

when Grey Rose breathes her last. If he thinks on this,

he will suppose that he demonstrated bravery, or enlightenment, or death.

V.

The inhuman scream from the brutally tortured is in fact a reiteration of what it means

to be alive. In the moment of descent the purity of the future becomes clear.

If flames surround our feet and roast our life away, we deign to call them gods.

The knife that kills a careless tourist in a darkened alley becomes the kiss

of the Madonna. So many, so many in the trenches, and all of them with prayers.

Oh, the consolation of irony! They are faced with infinity,

with the closing of eyelids, the solace of coffin or urn or saltwatered grave.

They cry for God with swords carving out their abdomens,

with bullet holes in their lungs, with cancer at their bones or pancreas.

In the very last moments, they are all shown the most gruesome memories

of life. The unspeakable abuse of adults to children, of men upon women,

of fire on every living thing that creeps or runs or flies or digs beneath the ground,

all the most clarified evils, every man or woman sees these things before their death;

they compare these things to the future, the nonexistence that is the melting of a thread,

and they say of them-

"God, my god" or "mother, mother, my mother" or "Oh, my, how beautiful."

Six Seeds

I.

Today the air was clean like chemistry,

Like the bottom of a small swimming pool.

Today I cannot write of a dead boy.

But if I could he would be very young

II.

The most alarming facet of nature

Is perhaps the manner of reflection,

And repetition, of beautiful things:

Teeth all identical, sharp bayonets

Held ready to give a shark one more meal,

Bloodied flesh torn then turned back into blood.

We are now in ravenous months, the spring

From which life flows. This hunger, in its turn,

Will create a barren land where once lived flowers.

And every year when the snows melt, the spears

III.

Some were purple, some crimson, some yellow.

I held them with care after their demise.

Later, my love will bind them together

And they will wither on the windowsill.

New storms will seem angrier than the old,

But I will not fear their thunder and wrath.

I fell in love with her with the sea blackening.

A man lives until the day that he dies

Carmen 39

I have had very grand ambitions.

I will be more frightening than any man

who has not been a butcher of men.

I will burn the churches down

when I can be sure that those within

worship the one true god.

When a tree is planted I will set fire to the roots.

Carmen 38

Without knowing what it is to die, I am left with very little to say.

Is one a savage if bodies killed in the crash of war are not mutilated?

Can one be a Monster if they do not abuse their children?

The meanings of words are polluted and obscured.

My thoughts leave the woman I love, for a moment, to fixate upon

some simpler tasks. Perhaps a condemnation of my father,

or someone who wrote a bad book, once.

My dear, the wine turns quickly to vinegar.

If you will not have things one way, will you accept the other?

An Abrasion

My lover is exceptionally beautiful and would remain thus

even if she were not mine. Each day when she sleeps

I say small unprayers that her dreams will become more pleasant

than they are. When she sleeps her claws are duller than mallets

and sharper than swords- I gash myself with them and grow drunk

with the glory and wonder of my courage. When she sleeps I whisper her secrets.

"I am dangerous beyond your ken. I would kill the sun if I feared shadow."

Because she is a woman her body is soft in the most perfect places.

She sings. If I, too, sing, then it is as if I breathe and stone, too, breathes.

I sympathize with the exultations of the ancient priests, those that tear

hearts away atop stair-stepped pyramids and send souls to a dark master,

those that move hands like knives upon the necks of dove-white doves,

the red-beard who chains the largest of his male slaves to a tree before letting

out the blood: to know a god is real is insufficient.

Ritual is the manifestation of belief.

When I lay with her and her teeth rend slightly at my flesh, she is satisfied with this.

I dare not do the same to her. How could I ever stop devouring, if allowed to begin?

I would be a madman sentenced to death for ripping her limbs from her body,

for twisting at her neck, gnawing her liver, for every awful detail of my horrific feast.

Of such is the kingdom of heaven.

Hymn to Ares

Like a churchyard left to rot, or one where the poor are buried

in the highest places, like loving a woman you cannot touch

because she is already dead or in the arms of another

is the soldier who spills no innocent blood.

Some are very coarse like my hands when I touch a woman or speak to one.

Some are the kisses that a mourner gives to death,

that a child gives to the fire that dedicates their homes to the deep night.

Some I have never seen but I have heard the witnesses.

Terrible and swift as a whip or the break of day, fearsome

as the crows lunging at the eyes of the fallen, rage like the fangs of the sun!

We have flayed men and woven their skins for your bedsheets, Red One,

lover of the goddess of love, shamed by the Crippled, defeated by the Greeks-

but are you not yet satisfied with our savagery? Was it not enough to kill

their women and children with darts that pierce as a ray of light pierces

a mountain from impossibly far away, was it necessary to corrupt our champion?

He seems so hungry for the wine in veins, even if he does not drink his fill.

He does not know how to make a sacrifice to you, except with the blood and flesh

of these our human kin: he sets them aflame. He prays wordlessly, he avenges.

Bless him, my God, for soon he is to be judged.

Revelations

Wanderer, yet again my land marches

As if to war in the far-off reaches

Of the world, to mountain and high desert,

To crush the descendents of an empire

-Oh, such splendor in that time, chariots

Gleaming like the Sun that was also their King...

Now steel and glass are the works of man,

Now none hang males from trees in sacrifice:

My land and theirs each praise a pagan god,

And in truth I have never made the blót.

I have called you here only from dire need.

Refuse this rite, and my head is forfeit;

If I displease you, sever hence my soul,

Let me never share wine with my kindred.

Grey One whose name is Fury, the One-Eyed,

The Allfather, invoked only in shouts. Odin!

Come!

The God is tall! Mighty like old forests,

A tattered wide-brimmed hat obscures his face,

A spear more terrible than flame or hell

Lays well within reach. He is older than the sea!

"May a thousand years pass before the Wolf!

May your wife's second sorrow wait an age!

Father of All, with banners my kingdom

Threatens another land. Eighty millions

Are said to dwell therein, and most like lambs.

Most are innocent of grave ills, simple

Folk who wish to find Love and worship god;

Yes, they are as all women and men are.

I fear that in a few short years, or months,

We will punctuate their nights with iron,

We will make torturous devices red

With rage and heat and make the young suffer

From disease and fear and hot, carving bombs.

Will this conflict spell the end of our time,

Or the beginning of the path to death?

Many years ago in a hospital

I brought contraband oranges down stairs

To a friend not allowed to come up stairs.

We were in prison, the doors were all locked,

The windows were all locked and thick as wrists,

She was imprisoned but had oranges

And I put the fruit inside my jacket

So that no one could see that I was stealing.

We lived together two weeks in those cells.

I never taught her chess, but I understand her.

She is alive. I am alive. Grey One,

Is my land soon to create a prison

That will comprise most men-women-children

That are not my color, my kind, my creed?

Will anyone dare to bring oranges for them?

If I see two ravens, is the decision made?

Shall I weep for starvation and cholera?

Shall I cheer for brave and glorious victory?"

And behold, the Allfather spoke, and thus he said-