Shire

	1.

	Then stoop to
	Dorset wingbone, greener
	than the tarn of morning, 
	flayed by Romans 
	into their stony roads.
	Lost in long grass, 
	in the idle stand of futurity,
	its testing, testing 1, 2, 3.
	They owned the collars of humans
	& drove all before them.
	To end in a stone gutter, 
	as apes of the impossible
	might sing of
	moss & detritus.


	2.
	
	Manuals for longing
	written on sheep bones:
	domain of mysterium
	made legible in tumulus hard drive.
	Arch overall of dawn-stone, 
	the plunged or hurled 
	hand-carved looms 
	& whirls for elder scry
	at solstice.
	Regard the cult of 
	green grass, thriving 
	in blue whir
	of harp smoke.
	What is prayer but
	a handsomeness returned
	against bitter bloom
	for the grained knob
	and whorl of skullcap winter?
	To say anything at all requires
	a longing for distance
	in which the question of
	completion does not 
	arise.
	
	
	3.
	
	Cut open a field 
	by a blade of light.
	Walk web of contesting paths
	& speckle desire 
	beside a ditch of waters.
	
	To receive a thing in its going
	means a cress of branches
	and all the richness folded
	by earth-ecclesia
	into the uppermost air
	the dirt-root &
	compass of sight.
	
	Move as a weir of light
	among the many names
	she has for you.
	
	
	4.
	
	As what is often said
	is not the sounding but the swoon.
	By it we mean a light
	other than the sun.
	
	Beyond a ray of enduring
	any cloud will come
	and in its blueness escort
	the things that are further & that are bright.
	
		
	Note of wholeness 
	but never wholeness itself.
	Splinter of music
	on which to build the shard.

	Rising on this green, 
	a thing dreamed, its plume
	or car drawn
	by numerous waters.
	
	Sun in a blue knot
	chanting above history.
	A bone typeset
	with error, eros, litany.
	
	Whatever we think we mean 
	when we say “it happened here.”
	Brightness gone to wood downs, 
	to briar haven, to red crown.
	
	
	The Binding
	
	
	But in the keep of oils
	who re-folds the fold?
	The downed day says
	a burning & a treble.
	
	Forlorn by stealth my body 
	reforms through fracture.
	The aureate sign for living
	cures luster out of stain.
	
	To place at the foot of the bride 
	the true account of a will
	gone astray is to rise above
	the bitterness of the book.
	
	Weeping in a shirt of fire 
	giving river to fog 
	fog to nothing 
	not even a name.
	
	Or this will be the real wind
	accosting sight with
	a darkness out of prayer?
	The iron moon that lights the way
	
	singeing the hair, coronal
	as a series of love notes
	set on edge & silvered
	for unbinding the lips of the dead.