Prelude

Cracking

To the north it was dark; the skyhanging around mountains - a mantle of water.White curtains of lace pulled closed by cyclonic air over brilliant illuminated fragments -copse, river limb, field.

Rooks in chaos choreographise the swirls of westerlies that rush forwards,pressing upon all boughs and all bows to the squalling blastknocked flat crackfingered roots bent backwardssalute the sky or flail to cover wrinkled boles,exposed and flashed the secret earthen crotchin multiple junctures groping this wall of saturated air,shuddering phloembark offunclothed and shameless thrash each whip of seasoned growth,the sappy hair crowned yellow-green,face planted, mouth full of mud.

Smashed teeth of timbersink craven desires into grassy skin,peeling and weeping under watered eyes,bud bulges sluiced.

Knock knotted the old man willow,so horny he sexes the wormsand risesengorged from their bed.

To the North the hills arealready under night’s hands,soft and cold.

Chapter 1

Willow Snake

Light oozing between sky and land, slipping quietly into my eyes as I walk the banks of the river, feeling the air fill my ears and nose, the shy fluttering of leaves as willows bow their serpentine greeting, shaking in fear of my knife. Here are the bones and corded frame, the interwoven histories. Cutting and regrowth. I came here at this time the year before the year before the year and cut the wands. You are children to the blade and bough; an uneasy and unequal alliance. I will make with you a vessel, a vehicle to carry any who wish to travel. You will become a basket depending beneath the pregnancy of a balloon. Your sinuous dance in this early breeze will become corrugated and solidified. You shed your tails for me in an understanding that I will leave your heart uncut. Reaching across to the nearest limb I hold the length with one hand and prepare to slice down with the other, blade in motion, then stop, all actions frozen. Up and onto my arm a green snake has twisted itself - linking branch and flesh. Locking us together, blood and sap, leaves scales and hair.

Chlorophylous

The stick falls straight,weighted heel fromhand to earth returning,thoughts suspended.

His work fell shortcaught wanting for love - lay there, recumbent unbent and green.

Struck first by thought and then by lightening - seared his crown clean, a bifurcating crack.

Painting and dancing, calypso collapso, alone in the meadow cutting staves.

Alone in the meadow with coppice and pollard, purple black nimbus consuming the sky.

Reaping the ribs for a basket weave; plum wood handles curled like ears.

A basket to carry his crippled heart, a gift of desire and vegetal fears.

Small browned leaves spin wound tornado round in momentary flight and scutter away.

Cumulations lift through charged, thick air and his hair stands tall, excited and changed.

Arms around a bundle of womanly wands weighing his thoughts, colouring in heat.

The sky is riven, burst asunder, strikes the heavens upon his head.

Soundlessly fuse blown collapse and slide, a boneless fillet, kippered and knackered.

Red round circle burned entry and exit, head to coccyx then jumped to earth.

Around him a nest of fallen willow, reciprocity - each limb holds another.

Fallow lies the field at rest under rain and silent too this man, hands and face open.

Spring rises jubilant, grass blades cut through the warp of his clothes and he is naked.

The cast net of sticks strikes out roots and reaches up vivid viridian arms.

Twice the height of man with one season’s growth, flowing up across years - around human remains.

Standing now both man and wood with chlorophyllous hair together in the meadow.

Chapter 2

Glass Snake

Fragments of a sleeping world; I saw you blink, slowly, first one eye and then the other; washing away a glass scale that was forming there. I opened my mouth to speak to you and found upon my tongue’s tip, another; held out my hand towards you and felt the reflected nuance of this gesture, caught within the curved facets of a glass shard. There is something hidden here but how to see it? This moment slides circumferentially. The closure of a lid cupped with saline care around planetary sight. I scry with my little eye something that no one can see.

Broken Scales

Hold your tongue! Thus spakeththe all and none.We sat in the garden dark,shaved and inscribed,a tumbler in your hand of fire,of burnt umber.Pure is your eye and without loathing,mine Übermensch,snap off your tail in seven pieces - smooth manoeuvre.Shatter scatter scales, broadcastwith frequencyyour cataleptic convulsionssilent, dancing;the biggest come-on confusion.Whilst you depart,the all and none has all but goneand philosophyhas become a trophy wifeto now and then.

In failing evening’s light I ran, away from and to wards in simultaneity. The air was cool and shadows coalesced between young trees, their arms, like my own, reaching upwards towards the gradient sky melting from aquamarine into darkest pitch. Overhead an air balloon was passing like a thought or an offer. From it depended a basket woven with green willow and below that a rope. As the aeronautilus sailed overhead this pendulation passed between and amongst the branched figures, catching and releasing. An invitation or a reluctance. I ran, away from and towards with an increasing sense of urgency and reached. My hand on an arm so long, with fingers so remote, and closed them in faith upon the cord. I was raised at once into the air, my feet limp, toe’s tips trailing between the finger-branches and leaves. Above me the willow basket, above that, gas and ropes and cloth of the balloon. For some moments it seemed that my fate was not my own and that I was a passenger, the journey unknowable and inscrutable. The night thickened around me. In my hand the rope twisted and cooled, coiled and sheared. A glass snake’s tail. Then shattered, a million million scales dis embodied and falling upon the world. I fell into the forest night. Turned, within the hips of the sky and dropped like water into a glass vase, head towards the earth, limbs curled around. There was a silence, a stasis, in which the balloon trailed away above the forest and darkness. Then the glass cracked. A triplet of seams fracturing the vessel from rim to pedestal. You blinked again and here we are, glass in my mouth and something awakening at the corner of your eye, possibilities without promises; a sudden softness, pupils deepening, lids relaxing, skin becoming translucent and fragmented, head sleek. With a drunken lucidity I hold out my hand, finger extended, not pointing but indicating or receiving like some stuccoed archetype on a Roman ceiling, and there across the whorls lay a scale of glass. I begin to talk, speech broken and dangerous, your image fractures, all meaning is lost.

Chapter 3

Moura - The Eyed Lizard

I see you in the moment before crossing,extirpated, fallen, deciduous.Leaves beautiful and rustedmark you on both arms,veins browning against golden yellow -and lie there through a season of exchanges.Stone curls in your hair,built each in turn and pulledinto place - a braided distaff.Here you hold the ground withyour body of eyesan ocellated visionwhose focus burnsand leaches out.Matted matters etched cleanthat would press you flat and hold youbeyond all reasonable doubt.In the moment of seeing youyou are no more than my own eye.

This is the path, if you are looking for it. This way will take you, into my house of stones, ledges lined with vessels, voyagers beneath the earth. And look at you, fallen as you are and so small like a faerie, like a curled leaf, golden in this autumnal sun. You arrive where we shall all arrive, at the glimmer, the glamour; one leg extended, heel first with decisive stride, chin up, eyes upon the horizon, arms in full swing. Then stop, vitrified, while the truth falls from the sky upon your shoulders and you are measured, weighted, counted. And here you with your refractive index, your edges, your hints and glints and glimmers. Here you in split infinities and prismatic splendour. Here the flushed royalty of colours, jewelled and faceted, and at the corner of each closed eye a cut stone whose angles avoid and whose shape slides. The most precious of births. Compassion solidified and smashed. You are a splinter upon my tongue, deflecting my words, cutting the sense. Across your surface my breath accelerates, throwing out syllables that can strip skin and lacerate love. This is the direction we will take together, forwards a foregone conclusion, into, between and beneath stones. You are my most treasured, my child. Let the scales grow over your eyes to form a vision of brilliance, a kaleidoscope of futures. Light is flying out across the hillside; passing through and around leaves, amongst dancing insects rising and falling in columns of air, then onwards over dark brown waters where they slither and coil upon the ground and thence thus then to you, upon your granite lintel, illuminating the smashed vessel within which you travel, colouring your translucent body with a precious glow. Hold my hand, little one, you can take the final step now. Lead with your toes and not your heel, let your arms dance, light fills your eyes and your head, pours into your body. You must become the vase, the hand to hold the world, the hips through which all life will pass. The sun striking your surface will cast a million shimmering spells upon the sky and we shall move onto the earth together, Mouras Encantadas.

Chapter 4

The Great Serpent

Call me by my mother’s name,Manetta Creek;Call me when the waters rise andWhirlwind spirits shriek.

Green witc...