The Wrecking Light Read Online Free Page B

flittering there
to notice.
But when they tried to speak their grief,
all that they heard was a tiny
high-pitched squeak.
    No human can hear them now
where they hang, huddled in the rafters,
under the thatch.
Shunning our daylight
they flit only by night
and take their name
from the time that they appear:
the vesper bats.

AN AMBUSH
    None survived.
The platoon had forgotten
the fable of the patient fox, waiting
for the night's sudden
drop to zero.
A minute is all it takes
and the white lake is dotted in stars
already frozen red,
and the blown feathers of ducks.
Just their feet left
still standing there, webbed hard
into the trap-ice.

ODE TO A LARGE TUNA IN THE MARKET
After Neruda
    Here,
among the market vegetables,
this torpedo
from the ocean
depths,
a missile
that swam,
now
lying in front of me
dead
    surrounded
by the earth's green froth
— these lettuces,
bunches of carrots.
Only you
lived through
the sea's truth, survived
the unknown, the
unfathomable
darkness, the depths
of the sea,
le grand abîme,

only you:
varnished
black-pitched
witness
to that deepest night.
    Only you:
dark bullet
barrelled
from the depths,
carrying only
your one wound,
but renewed,
always resurgent,
locked into the current,
fins fletched
like wings
in the torrent,
in the coursing
of the underwater dark,
like a grieving arrow,
sea-javelin, a nerveless
oiled harpoon.
    Dead
in front of me,
catafalqued king
of my own ocean;
once
sappy as a sprung fir
in the green turmoil,
once seed
to sea-quake,
tidal wave, now
simply
dead remains.
    In the whole market
yours
was the only shape left
with purpose or direction
in this
jumbled ruin
of nature;
you are armed
amongst this greenery,
a solitary man of war,
your flanks and prow
black
and slippery
as if you were still
a well-oiled ship of the wind,
the only
true
machine
of the sea: unflawed,
undefiled,
navigating now
the waters of death.

GRAVE GOODS
    He wanted to outlive the grim husbandry
of battle order, outrun
the breath of the damned, his sleeves
flecked with their spit, his sword with their dung;
to move beyond the hooks and eyes
of women, their insinuated blades, to pass
through the scrim of tissue, through this
chanonry of blood, to reach a place
of peace and honour, fresh running water,
a morning of porcelain and lavender
combed by light, folded and smoothed over.
    He came instead to a closed silence. Here
were the attributes and trappings of the hunt:
flint blades and fishhooks, bone pendants,
carved figurines of elk, snakes and humans,
a wild boar's leg-bone whittled and whetted
into a dagger, bear skulls for bowls, stone flakes
for arrowheads. A seated woman with a baby
in her lap, dusted in red ochre, next to a man
wearing a crown of antlers. Between the two,
and dead like them, a young child laid down
into the wing of a swan.

ALBATROSS IN CO. ANTRIM
After Baudelaire
    The men would sometimes try to catch one,
throwing a looped wire at the great white cross
that tracked their every turn, gliding over their deep
gulfs and bitter waves: the bright pacific albatross.
Now, with a cardboard sign around his neck, the king
of the winds stands there, hobbled: head shorn,
ashamed; his broken limbs hang down by his side,
those huge white wings like dragging oars.
    Once beautiful and brave, now tarred, unfeathered,
this lost traveller is a bad joke; a lord cut down to size.
One pokes a muzzle in his mouth; another limps past,
mimicking the
skliff, sclaff
of a bird that cannot fly.
    The poet is like this prince of the clouds
who rides the storm of war and scorns the archer;
exiled on the ground, in all this derision,
his giant wings prevent his marching.

THE GREAT MIDWINTER SACRIFICE, UPPSALA
    It seems I came too late.
The cart-tracks leading
down the hill to the old town
are frosting over, already filling with snow.
If the temple is gold, as they say,
it's too dark now to tell. I tether my horse
and walk through the ruins of the marketplace,
its stalls empty, the tables of the feast
all cleared; mice