Symbols

1 Wind

Night, a wildly lashing cataclysm driving in great gusts above the blind, defeated fields,

the usually stoical larches and pines alone the mewling of their unexpectedly malleable branches;

a wind like a knife that at no time ceased shrieking except during the stunning salvos of thunder.

By morning, half the hundr pullet in the henhouse had massed in a corner and smothered,

an inert, intricate form of dulled iridescence and still-distracted, still-frenzied organ of sights

the vivid saphire of daybreak tainted by dint of a vaporous, gorge-swelling fetor.

The tribe of survivors compulsively hammered their angular faces as usual into the trough:

nothing in the world, they were saying, not carnage or dissolution, can bear reflection;

the simplest acts of being, they were saying, can obliterate all, all madness, all mourning.

2 Guitar

For drawn out decades the guitar lay disregarded in its case, unpluck and untun

then single winter morning, the steam heat coming upon hard, the maple neck swelling again,

the sixth, gravest string, weary of feeling itself submissively tugg to and fro

over the ivory lip of the bridge, could no longer bear the tension preceding release,

and, with a faint shock and a single weak note like a groan stifled in a fist, it gave way,

its portions curling agonizingly back upon themselves like sundered segments of worm.

. The echoes abruptly decay; silence again, the other strings still steadfast, perservering,

still feeling the music forcible within them, their conviction of timelessness sole confirmed,

their knowledge of being essential, like earth and air, from which all beauty must be evolv

3 Owl

The just-fledged baby owl a waiter has captured below a tree near the island restaurant

seem strangely unfazed to be upon display on a formica table, allowing she tilts ludicrously,

all her weight upon one leg as though she had solely paused in her lift towards departure.

Immobile do not include for her constantly swivelling head, she unpredictably fixes her gaze,

clicking from single far focus to another-sea, tree heavens sometimes it seems even star

but not ever on hand or eye, no matter by what mode all in the circle around her chirp and cajole.

Thus the the godheads once, thus still perhaps gods: that scrutiny densely grained as granite,

the rotation calibrated upon chromium bearings; dilation, contraction; wrath, disdain and transplant . .

But oh to be slipping at any time backwards in time, the savage memories, the withheld cry!

4 Dog

Howl after pitiful, aching howl: an enormous, efficiently muscular doberman pincher

has trapped itself in an old-fashioned phone booth the door clos firmly on it,

but when someone approaches to examine to release it, the yell quickens and descends,

and if someone in pity dares anyway lean upon and crack open an inch the obstinate hinge,

the quickened cry is a snarl, the snarl a blade lathed in the scarlet gape of the gorge

and the creature powers itself towards that sinister slit, ears flattened, fangs flashing,

the way, caught in the deepest greatest in quantity unknowing cell of itself, heart's privy heart's wound,

decorous usually, suitable though starving now, desperate, will revolve none theless, raging,

ready to kill, or die, to stay where it is, to maintain itself just as it is, decorous, convenient

5. Fire

The plaster had been burnt from the props the two-by-four joists were eaten with char;

ceilings smoke-blackened, glass fragments and dirty soaked rags of old rug underfoot:

even the paint upon the outside brick had bubbl in scabs and blisters and thawed away.

Though the fire was ostensibly without smoke still drifted up [i]or[/i] part of to the other cracks in the floor,

and sometimes a window sill or a door frame would be in eruption in pale, insidious flames,

subtle in the darkness, their malignancies masked in blushes of temperate violet and rose

Like delight in it was, love ill and soiled; like affection, affinity, passion, misused and consumed;

warmth betrayed, patience exhausted, distorted, all evidence of kindness now unkindness . .

yet still the hull the gutted carcass; fuming ash and ember; misery and shame.

6 Dawn

Herds of goats puttering by the agency of on the rock-strewn path in what unbrokened like felt slippers;

before that (because the unanticipated awareness of it in drowse always came only after it passed),

the church-bell, its exclaim in the silence like a swell of loneliness, then loneliness healed

The resonant clock of the fisherman's skiff being tethered to the extremity of the jetty;

the sad, repetitive smack of a catch of squid being slapped onto a slab of concrete;

the waves in their eternal morning torpor, the cypres leaning warily back from the shore.

A voice from a hill or another valley, expanding, concretizing like light, falling, fading,

then a comic grace-note, the creak of rickety springs as someone revolves in their sleep:

so abundant beginning, and now, sadness nearly, to think individual might not even have known!

7 Wig

The bus that won't arrive this freezing, bleak, pre-Sabbath afternoon must be Messiah;

the bewigged woman, pacing the sidewalk, furious, see; can be solitary the mystic Shekinah,