Brother Mountain – Your Hidden Face, Your Secret Name (take 1)

Dedicated to one particular daybreak,
who arrived a year and a half before I did into the family,
and who was there when the internal mountains finally broke forth.

 

I.
A vast rump humps up,
A score of furlongs long or more,
Rippling with grassy-rugged rock-muscle,
Though still, still as the ages,
Worn by wind and ever-rain into the terrain
We see from so small a person-body here
In delighted fear and humble awe.

The great green-mottled form is still, I say.
Still, it rises, or seems to be rising
Right now as we meet it with heart-wide eyes,
Nostrils flared in joy-terror at the psychic fragrance
That with mountainous flagrance flouts our small notions
Of small loveliness with vast blasting majesty.

The great green-rippled length looks still, I say,
But just about to move at any second. We small ones
Can feel the rock’s pent up motion in our small bones,
As if those stone ripples – massive shadowed dips really,
Miniature valleys and downs – as if those muscled curves
Might ripple forth and shift any moment right before our
Awestruck eyes, as if those ripples might rumble and slide,
And rearing up from the mountainside’s far side, unseen
Until now, a great granite head might turn to look at us
With a monstrous crag of face, two incredible deep-set holes
Of verdant luminescence for the man-mountain’s eyes,
Burning holes in our mind’s with the impossible gaze, a last
Happy-mad sight for mere mortals dying in deep love and satisfaction
At a mere glance from one of God’s hidden creatures.

So the mountain’s features make us feel,
down here in our smallness.

II.
Maybe you’re not a man-mountain at all, but a
Beast-upthrust shepherded by some unseen Titan.
I know you and your siblings are mere foothills
In light of Himalayas or Rockies, yet no other range
Rumbles quite like your primordial morphology.

They are all kings and queens and sentries towering,
Where you are humbler and hoarier in your low crouching,
Ready to rise, to spring bestial and roaring; and yet
You are not only rough, but elegant also in the green sheen
Of your mist-slaked, sunwashed pelts, which appear
Nearly velvet, if they could but be felt by
Gargantuan coarse Hands rubbing and petting,
Accompanied by cyclopean Voice acclaiming: ‘Good boy!’

Or maybe you are the kind of beast, shy but fierce,
That is only to be tracked, flushed out, and wrangled,
A pursuit perhaps thought better of once attempted,
Resulting in casualties even among gigantic hunters.

III.
But maybe your kith is not found above-ground at all.
Maybe you are an under-thing calling to our own under-ness.
‘Deep calls to deep’ in your emerald and umber swells.
I’m sure I heard at least one observer cry: ‘sea monster!’

Yes, that too rings true. Your great swimming shapes
Have hurled us into deeps. Maybe it is a massive
Fanned tailfin that will any moment unfurl from
Your unseen extremity, and a yawning maw
From the other end, a great seeking mouth agape
With such width as could only be oceanic.

Aye, we are sailors who catch a glimpse of your
Deep-sport: wave thrashing or ocean-bottom crawling,
either way capsizing our hearts and swallowing us
Whole in jubilant excess. Such depths in heights!

IV.
Whatever you are – man-mountain or beast-mountain or
Megalithic leviathan – you are one of God’s monsters
I am glad to know. I am privileged to have made your
Face-to-face acquaintance more than once, each time a shattering
Meeting, if fleeting.

I thank you for the meal you made of me (mere morsel at best,
I know – more likely a kernel or crumb) and I thank you for
The kind meal you gave me each time, each time a little more,
Nourishing me from weakness to strength to strength, still small,
But growing, growing, eroding and rising mountainous inside,
Until at last this pen could bleed a little blot in your honour.

Brother Crag and Sister Cairngorm, I am blessed to serve
Alongside you at the curve of our mortally wounded world
That in one day dying will rise again renewed and glory-flooded,
Knowledge-deluged, where your great folds and curves will finally
Shift and coarse in awful grace and you will at last lift up your
Glorious head and all will see

Your hidden face

And hear

Your secret name.

Fauna Boy

Inspired by and dedicated to my son, age 8.

 

I’ve seen him
foxing in the evening
through the quieted streets,
homba in lapine.

I’ve seen him
dogging on a lead
on the pavements by houses,
unleashed through a grassy park.

I’ve seen him
soaring down, flapping up
on trees, wires, poles, fences,
arcing air or flitting ground.

In winged guises he is most multiple:
crow, gull, jay, sparrow, finch,
and once, no, twice, I saw him
as that strange graceful hermit, heron.

I’ve seen him
as darting rabbit too
and snail with slow-seeking horns
and the occasional grey-clad squirrel.

They call him Beastie

and these are not his only forms, no,
these are merely his city-wise shapes,
appropriate fauna for physical eyes.

But also…

I’ve seen him
foxing through my dreams,
speaking not in vulpine barks but
people-voiced words of guidance.

I’ve seen him
dog-headed and gorilla-bodied
in hat and coat, swing from rooftop
to lamp-post, light a stogie, loiter.

I’ve seen him
with wings of goshawk
on keen-clawed mongoose
flying down with grinning fangs.

I’ve felt him
in oceanic dreaming,
as coiling octopus, gliding manta,
coruscating cuttlefish.

Beastie is all of these

and so many more
by day and night and dream
beside us and inside us.

And some say

they’ve seen him,
strangest form of all,

as a little boy.

(photo by Flannery O’Kafka)

Hospitality for Ray

Sandstone lambent at the near
and far edges of many a span of daylight;
softly sun-washed bracken brackets the days;
a firelight that has travelled so many millions of miles
to warm and brighten us so momentarily.

Weary traveller, come in, come in
here at day’s end or day’s begin,
shake the stardust from your clothes,
have a morsel, a sup, a rest,
and when you have recovered, regale us
with your traveller’s tales, the gossip you gathered
on your immense journey here, the sights you’ve seen,
perils you’ve surmounted, wonders you’ve witnessed;
we hate to rush you when you’ve only just caught your breath,
but oh, do hurry! We can see you are fading fast
and we crave a last word from you,
some crust of news before your parting.

But no, no, pay us no mind. We are greedy.
You have brought your very self all this weary way
and we are content to bask in your presence
and thank you profusely for your effuse translucence
on these walls of stone so warmed and flushed,
for making lush with light the scrubby brush,
for brightening our brows,
for lighting up our eyes so richly.

Yes, a hearty handshake and slap on the back
before you go away again so quickly, never to return,
having played your part – we will await your counterpart,
the next traveller who alights here on our day’s doorstep
after so long a journey, and we will welcome him or her
in your memory, time and time again.

For the sun-licked slab that blushed in day’s margin
we bless you, fellow-creature,
for the blessing you, apostolos of phos,
so faithfully delivered from so far… thank you for
the burning thickening of colour on our drab world,
that generous drop of fire from your fireworld so vast
and distant, yet so near now that you’re here. Truly,
he makes his ministers a flame of fire.

For the Bird

I started to dedicate it
to you, ‘my feathered friend’.
Are you? Are we friends?
I feel, I genuinely do, as if we are.

Whence this feel of kinship? As if
we two were fish-hearts caught up
in a kith-and-creel of familial ligature,
as if the whole world-boat were
a know-country for old kin
(bird-boy and ape-jay knuckling
through the undergrowth again!).

‘But as if,’ I can hear the rejoinding cries,
‘is if-and-only-if as applies.’

The morph-police are onto us, hide!
Their anthropo-mechano-allo-zoo
boss-embossed bullets bleed us
too true and in a bone-sickening instant
all our meta-tricks crunch phoric
beneath their see-through nightsticks.

‘What do you think you are,
indigenous?’ they pigeon us
(and you’re not even that bird!).

Ach, who gives a flying fact?
(I’d give them the bird,
were you mine to give,
but not that word, as I live.)

Look, friends or no (I speak
from a bleeding mouth and maybe
that’s the only way)
your motion, oh bird of my brow-
beating, maps me out
in topographic greeting,
now don’t laugh! Look:

the zag and tremble-flit,
controlled shudder of bones,
the riffle, the dart, hop and blur,
up you whir, touch down again
as you please, and with ease as
consummate as grift your ways
are out of mind most days, until
in a trice you track in front of my footpath
or group-wing across my eyes’ sky
and draw my blood up and out
in patterns I hadn’t guessed.

You, you, my feathered friend,
brought to gut immediacy for me
that I was on a gigantic ball winging orbital
through galactic expanses brimming
with just such dances as you
and your kind-kin exhibit ceaselessly
could we, the self-policing monkey bunch,
but trouble to fish-leap a flash
(bloody words a spilling) alongside
your kith-keel and feel with fear
the joint-not-joint akimbo.

How could I not call you friend
when you benedict me so?

(Photo by Flannery O’Kafka)