Horus

1

The horizon streamed out of an electric dark
Like a torrent of foam in an emerald gale
When under the loud blue clap of noon
Thus in my primal image I awoke -
A premonition in the feathering ice,
A rough stone sketch of my lunar age.
Now Time has digested into rock
And only the wind moves under space,
Flexing to the brunt of my plunge and dip
Among deepening hills, over Mendip miles.

In snow, a dark star to boomerang lambs,
In thunder I flicker on sheep flock alike or golfer
To give wish expression.
Hunger is the crux of my mettle,
The never-die that I am cast in.
And I am neat to decorate warrings,
A fleck of spray, a rust-cross,
A crucifixion limned in dried blood
Nailed where a gust has flung me.

Of all things vulnerable I spurn pre-emption:
All creation bleeds together
On the needles of my visioning
Among the crashing weathers.
I am soaring like an aria between crescendos.
A gesture, and my needs are served
By gravity - my weakness plummets me
To meat. When I have killed, the broad
Hill keels its hull and hauls me, up
Up through stitching drizzle to my safe roost
On the sky's shoulder. No thought blurs this.
It is a mathematic of the gut.

I track the circles of the storm
And stamp through my reducing gaze across horizons.
Still eyes, unruffling the far sky's feathers,
Have earned their inwardness.
I am alone here. My tree
Shelters in its root. I deduce this:
All non-hawk is an absence, blot,
Mere growth of the excrescences of mice;
Cosmology - a line defined by two points,
Claw and mouse. Mouse is god.
His line is immortal, killed for my sin,
Reborn each day. I kill again.
I am a microcosm of this sleek order: Thought
Is simple, straight, true to my killing purpose.
My taught sinew and my arrowy flight ape this.
Thus is hawk the measure of all things!

2

Here my wings flare and lapse
Slowly through the brown air
Over the nostrils of black dragon chimneys,
Their beat a silent din above
The infernal clangour of dwarfish industry.

Sometimes I shudder skyward to my old place.
My orbit grows less hourly.
Grass flaps and shivers like
Wet mackerel on the pitching decks
Of trawlers smaller than my eye,
Gull-scouted and beyond me now to try
Or dream for. I take more to the towns
These days, scavenge the defenceless tips.

That so few bleak winters, such unfathomed yearning,
Bound in white circles on the shrieking space,
Should see me come to this.
All sky disowns me.
But my grave is chosen.
I shall plummet leaden
To a heaven of mice.