Snake Tongues and Bear Thoughts

I with my split-tongued personality
do find it atrociously difficult to speak
in ways that I myself understand,
let alone for all you who are not divided
between the snake tongue and eagle eye and
great ursine paws that rent the earth beneath their claws.
A mighty doom is laid upon him who,
unable to speak straight and mammalian,
must think like a reptile or a hawk
(or worse still an insect, a thoughtless ant, able only
to repeat that most basic of commands)
and I who swear by bear or boar or other beast
do find myself split.

Hiss hiss, caw caw, what interminable noise they make
within my mind, and pay no rents there,
no obligation to feudal lord or longship captain
among even one of them.

Drive Them Into the Sea

Quiet Gildas tells the story
of our swords sharp and reddened with
the blood that must be holy
for it springs from martyrs whose death-gift
is a saintliness that enlivens only
ecclesiastical history
like the venerable Bede's
for we drove the saints into the sea.

Chatelaine de Vergi

And tell me Chatelaine whether or not
that little dog that might have stood guard
over your virtue
had a loving hand to care for it
when all Burgundy wept for you.
The knight fallen through heart-ache and heart-split
and all the candles lit in Vergi chapel,
one grave for both the lovers
and another for the deceitful not-quite
stepmother,
who the Duke promised to hang.
Did he take you with him, little pup,
on his way to templar-dom,
or did they all leave you behind out of sorrow
till you became the wolf again
and haunted all Val-Du-Loup
like you should have done from the beginning?
Oh wolf-born one, howl for all who howl no longer.

How the Tale is Told

Thereover the moor and heath and heather
there comes a ringing and a singing from a voice
that needs no announcement beyond itself
for surely you know how the tale is told.
All the roses, red and white, sway in the morning
and in the light they seem to glimmer with dew
but it's only diamonds on their petals
left there by those weeping souls
who know how the tale is told.
And in the gloaming there are whispers
that ought by rights to be howlings
as the wolves are cowed into a false obedience
by those specters of another life, another death,
who heard how the tale is told.
Tells the tale within itself
of the wolves, the roses, the nights, the gloaming,
for any who would hear and listen and know
how the tale is told.

The Ophiolaters II

They stand in a deeply malignant circle
sketching out the limits of reality
as no other group is willing to
or can.
And false as they are they shed, not skins,
not the cloaks that cover their bodies,
but all higher language and thought
speaking only of the simplest things
and in the simplest terms
and quietly too
as if their snake-god-who-comes-from-the-earth
winged(?)
will not devour them in recognition of their reverence
but how could that be true?

Remembering Beowulf

Remember to us that good king
who goes now over the last whale-road
on his way into matchless fame and oblivion
truly the way of kings.
Remember racks and racks of shining mail
and arm-rings and wrist-rings
handed out to his men, that gift-giver who knew no equal!
Remember the gleaming of his swords in the gloaming
and the way they shone at sunrise, and how
the spear-points glittered at the noon of his glory
not so long ago.
And remember to us the whomp-whomp-whomping of his helicopters,
gunships black and silhouetted over the deserted dunes
the formic acid carried on their little wingtips.
And remember the rumble of his panzers
as they rolled though and over and across everything
that stood-
          -Tiresome, isn't it?  Now the young men have gone to sleep
and dream of the clatter and cracks of bullets and the stink
of viscera, that never really leaves your mustache.
And the old men, who should be mighty,
are no more than granite faces that are unmoving
in the firelight because they match the twists and turns so well.

I was in St. Michael's salient
when all Hell was let loose.