A Reel From Tarkovsky

(‘Stalker’ - Andrei Tarkovsky - 1979)

Dolly-tracks emanate
post-industrial pulse-fields:
electronica, escape from 
the sepia mundane. Three 
expeditionaries steam-roll 
 
the sterile land to a dystopian
Elysium. One of them inebriate;
one secreting a bomb; the
other: a visionary, or village
idiot of sorts, claiming gnosis.
 
All intent on La Zona.
 
 
At last you are weary of this antediluvian world.
 
At last you would sledgehammer Mnemosyne.
 
Was it a meteorite? Some kind of augury?
 
And where will you incarnate in this Chernobyl-light?
 
 
Keep the long take going for as long as it takes.
 
 
Mephitic fog is your ambience of choice.
 
Your progeny remaining forever mutant.
 
Black dog in attendance.

Maestro

(For Joe Porter-Bolger)

Whispered sibilance,
	sacred antiphons
from triptych’s left panel,
	a sonic luminescence.
 
Magisters’ intimate hum
	in low-lit scriptoriums,
cantatas akin to pillow talk
practised by Japanese lovers.
 
A susurrus of myrrh and aloes.
 
 
 
*
 
 
 
Fondling sapphire
	I yearn for atasal,
an adytum on an island.
 
Intuition invents,
		that much is certain,
as invention intuits
	a yawp of its own occasion.
 
 
 
*
 
 
 
Musk of devotion,
	essential oils
		lubricate stubble.
 
I am agog for foam,
	and even that consoles me,
		my melopoeic minister.
 
 
 
*
 
 
 
Interdimensional:
segue segues into segue,
ply counterpoints ply,
	dove-jointed to Thou.
 
A salvific watermark,
	ideogram-autograph:
 
maestro’s bas-relief seal.

Oracle

(For Julia Gaze)

I am an instance of silverpoint,
wild mercury,
		a brimming measure
unable to spirit-level.
 
Learning to levitate
	even above terra trema.
 
 
 
*
 
 
 
What oblation?
Whose haemoglobin seals?
Staunching which love-wound?
 
These sibyls, these saints
	convene in grove and grotto;
follow their tracks at Michaelmas
	in unconditional aether and holly.
 
Scent out hydromel
	issuing from branch-work,
their ebb-tide’s crepuscular.
 
As I curate a season
from hermetic mood-boards,
		none the wiser.
 
 
 
*
 
 
 
Yeshua’s breath,
its measured pulse and stress.
	The rest can be carried
over with all you have
garnered from sonic granaries,
	a cornucopia bursting vibrant
with Gaia’s seed-buds.
 
 
 
*
 
 
 
Beyond radio’s thin aether,
the magisters radiate
	fiats and communiques
to my receptive cochlea.
 
Beatitudes being thermals
making the will pneumatic,
a column of fire and moly
	leading, 
		feeding multitudes.

High Priestess

To discern anima with aplomb
	read the minor arcana flush
 
A gift not lightly borne
	I suspend articles
			of my disbelief
 
I confess to the	
	indwelling hierophant
who dreams
	of a city on a hill
		which never sleeps
 
Gostly Moder
	do not forsake my
		supplication’s poem
 
Do not divine my fall
	just because
		I am crestfallen
 
I will not lightly bear
	your caveats of light
not in the dog days
	nor in the Latter Rain
 
Have found this haven’s niche
	and it’s most ergonomic
 
A conclave of radiance imbued
	an equinoctial stable
 
I may decide
	Moder lief
		to stay here
 
	mind out of time
 
winter out
	in your high summer

Hierophant

(For Blandine Longre & Paul Stubbs)

What tarocchi spread?
Who turns over the Empress?
Shape our ends, rough-hew
	them as we will . . .
 
To channel the arcana means
	to maintain a mortal coil:
receptive, ancestral, soaring.
 
Your clear-sight’s elector
	dilates into beryl.
 
Kung inscribes Bo leaves.
Siddhartha at one beneath his Banyan.
Apollonius makes peace with fauna.
Yeshua’s digit rewrites the dust.
Hypatia’s unsurpassed
		at her astrolabe.
 
All, all in this world of light;
a shining-forth of their godheads.
 
 
 
*
 
 
 
Is this the solar layer?
Throne on glacial throne
	coruscate an ex cathedra.
 
All-heal for the nations,
	an ex-voto, improvisatory,
at least implies sensibility.
 
I grasp the theophany,
	or I do not.
 
 
 
*
 
 
 
Without magisters:
	to falter, to be fazed.
Unable to sublimate
		the green fuse,
my dynamo depreciates.
 
Icons stripped of gold,
triptychs dismember,
	anamnesis abominates,
as the Hierophant
		waxes hoarse.
 
Scops leap out
	of infernal towers,
those cards refuse to tally,
	some are inverse.
 
As your Beast lumbers
	out of eyeshot
		into the suburbs:
scapegoated
	to within an inch 
of his hide.
 
Without magisters,
the solid
	melts into a void.
 
 
 
*
 
 
 
I, too, have known katabasis,
	the lack of a handrail, 
vertiginous thrill of gravity’s
		plunge at, say, 3am? 
 
Having played Castor 
to your Pollux
	as, proleptic, you do for me. 
 
This threnody of ours
thrums and purrs. It keeps us 
 
	going in the small hours.
 
 
 
*
 
 
 
Now I mew, Apollo-flayed:
Heaven and Hell 
		mere states-of-mind?
 
Gods and goddesses return
when we re-commence
		to reverence them?
 
Until then:
	götterdämmerung of silence.