5.The Terror by Duncan McGibbon (bts book recommendations TXT) 📖

me of parting
in the smile that was never given.

Do not tell me of the cold
in warmth no body took from another.

Do not tell me of hunger
in the touch that never soothed.

Do not tell me of thirst
in the kiss that never touched.

Speak only of the stone
you mistook for a flower

and I shall tell you
how it trembles for the sunlight still.


A Chanson of Her Blessing

After
the untouching
has bared our closeness;

you
and the blind minute
fends
the silence.
Do not think,
go;
the moles seek
the same ends as larks;
to curse the surface.

After
the dryness
has rained in our mouths;

you,
and the stillness
is
a lost thing.
Do not go,
hold;
the feat is to define blessing;
a flight dug
into air.

After
the emptying
weighs on our hearts;

you,
and the mould
will burst open.
Do not hold,
speak;
the hope awaits
another, who digs out

where we have buried our song.


Stupra

Smitten into the flesh
with the terrible violence
of negligent years,
of their precipitate
tunnelling,
a bodyshape
names itself,
numbs itself
into the gullible now.

Dull sockets, confused,
the lovers’ twined arms
shrug an aimless reflex,
fire muscles into emptiness.
He cannot touch the other,
the ex-
sister, the visitor.
Her famine insists.
she cannot breathe on the surface
of his image,
a palpable stoneshape,
come stumbling, come rolling in
from the other door.
a foundling,
a crystal, overcast.
Two severed hands
refused,
they palpitate
groping for loose eyes.
Nimble insistence
of the light,
it throws into shadow
both surfaces
which are guarded
by a split thought-shape,
impersonating
a flicker of concern.
A hidden head
infused,
holds a jug
of prayer,
where He has
dropped a changeless key
and slakes
the thirst of both
with an unfathomed
mouth.

Confessio Amantis

I “wolde go the middel weie
And wryte a bok betwen the tweie,
Somwhat of lust, somewhat of lore... “
Gower, Prologue.

It is too late,
for he was in a hurry to write
and you had gone
walking where flowers reached emptiness.

He was rushing
to be alone, to brood above the page.
You had set off,
mapless, where roads led from land that had lost its story.

He wanted to
tell how it was, that this was how it was.
You had gone
wandering where roads curled into the night.

He tried to gave
away all he ever thought to say,
yet you went out
to empty daily voices into floorless rooms.

He was anxious
to be somewhere
and you had found him
a place to rest where sleep was a stem floating in a lost marsh.

He was tired, but
in a rush to sleep,
while you had gone,
seeking the power of flight in extinct birds.

He was impatient
to be still, to stop the authority closing down years,
when you had gone
to chatter down neighbourhoods of time.

He was waiting
fro what doing to be undone,
while you had gone
to return by paths of fiction.

He is waiting
to be done with the undoing
and you have come
to unlock my door you came through.

Biographia Literaria

In proper style
our movement grows
to influence
receptive clay.
Our bodies have
revised the night
and merged their aims.
On speechless lips,
you frame conceits,
which speak of dreams
that memory
has filed away
for fetching touch
to issue new.
We print our works
on surfaces
of vanished joy
I smooth way
the daydrift prose
which clings to
your palimpsest thighs
on skin that is
ample to write
how we drafted
our dated limbs.
Text beside text,
originals
in stark array.
We are set out.
Editors of
an authentic
composition.
Our whispered word
can conjugate
a sentence where
two subjects rule.
Obscure diction
is our pleasure.
Two senses are
read into one.
Nothing checks
the metric flow
that in our veins
we know by heart
None can imitate
our fancied forms
of dual
imagination
and of no repute at all.


The Site

A man reads
and waits
by refuse tips,
writes nightly
and waits for loneliness.
He goes out
each day with a shovel
to dig up
buried cellars, which none
has heard of,
built by a hand
that wants man,
but holds only airy clay.

Habitat after habitat
has shut down.
The ecology is blinded,
behind boards.
A girl goes out with him.
He tells her
of the cellars he seeks.
She listens
and dreams
of ripened fields.
When he talks
of a living estate,
she listens.

Her eyes tell
of the land she has stored,
of the land
she will gather for him,
when he rests,
but he does not ask her.

One evening,
a hungry man comes,
who longs to be let in
and they feed him.
The visitor tells
the digging man,
whom it was who
hired him to send
him out each day
to dig out the earth
of refuse tips.
The visitor tells
the man he knows
where the cellars
are he seeks.
The man wakes
the tired girl
who listens.
At night
they take him out
to show him
where he digs.
The visitor
shows the man
where the cellars are.
They are so deep
and so long,
the man grows
angry and leaves.
She listens.
The visitor
and the girl
embrace, then part.
She promises
she will stay
with the man.
Later, she
wakes up
and turns back
the man’s clothes
and waits for him
to go out again
to the refuse- tips.
She sees that
more habitats
have closed.
She waits for him
to shrug his shoulders
and dig for the cellars
built by a hand
that has healed
the air and watches
for those who
can make clay thirst.


The Terror


The Terror

Starved thieves from middens, they gathered in crowds.
They waited by gates to listen, to crave.
They longed for the just, whose windows closed fast on the night,
whose jugs brimmed over with milk from the law
and listened for hearts which beat in their keyholes.
They gathered in crowds and stretched out dry fingers
to those who lived on in a land called no more.

They craved for their booty, for the dreams
they would own when they unlaced the fattened
and stretched back their fingers that tautened on bolts.
They longed for the day they would roll them and roll them
over the lawn that would spill with white skins.
From morning to evening, they waited, they gathered.

Cold thieves at dawn, they gathered by gates
that held fattened hearts, waiting on for the night.
for the safety of darkness, for the night-time
closed fast on their words, for the dogs,
in the darkness, unleashed on the lawns.

Steeped in fat justice, fat milk in their hearts,
The just call out. They call to each other, “Lie naked.
Lie naked under the law. We shall not sleep long.”
From nightfall to morning, their windows shut fast
on the thieves who lie stripped of the word.

Starved thieves at noon-time, they splintered the gates,
for the skins of the fattened, who lay under damask.
At noontime they shattered the windows to run
through the rooms of those who lay still.
In the noontide they rolled them onto the lawn
and found they were naked, unlaced and stripped thin.

Mute thieves at noonday, they reached for the milk,
for the jugs that stood brimming
with words of the law, to swallow the dreams
that spattered their whiteness on sheets
that were empty, on purple rolled on the lawn.

They tried to sleep on, to sleep on in the darkness
in a house of smashed windows, awakened at nightime
by the law of the dogs unleashed on the lawns.
Still thieves of morning, they swallowed the quick lime.
They swallowed the milk of those who slept on,
whose skins lay unlaced on the road that led out,
that led out where the dogs licked their necks,
by the gates they had splintered.

They retched on the booty of those who lay
out in the middens. They snapped off the fingers
from bolts that were fixed to cool down their mouths
that blistered with lime.

Cold thieves of wanting they craved and they called.
They crawled for the heartbeat that ceased in the lock.
They craved for the moisture that dried on the bolt.
They called for the taste in the milk of the law
whose jugs were all brimming with lime.

They gripped burning stomachs, wasted with milk
from the law of the dogs. They craved for the just ones
to give them to give them the keys for the milk
and show them the jugs of the law.
They stretched out dry fingers
for gates where they waited and went down the road
that led out to a land called no more.


Song of the Ascents

1.
His children, Lord, sleep fitfully.
They cough on fumes from oils
he burns on altars of tarmac.

Yet who tends Eden, now?
Your garden must be strawy
with the grass of beforehand.
Air and blood, Lord,
burn in his lungs.
He wants only an alternate field crop,
such as the young, self-cloned.


2.
In the ash altitudes, his jets
burn off their holocaust
of ripe Archean memory
with a tremor that tramples
the place of your great name
and unsettles the mortar of his house.

3.
Yet You bar him
from healing his barrenness.
Your stubble, Lord, could be burned.
Those great brambles, massed
over the lopped boles
of your famous orchards
could be fired for his profit,
earth and life, Lord, yield him a return.
He wants Your life-product and its waste.

4.
Sublime in a dry sky
his high creations
mingle an acid rain
which strips the forests
and wears smooth the stone
of statued virgins, whose faces
he never knew.
Yet You ward him off
Your sterile place,
when he could cast out
its abiding branches.
His sacrifices bargain with any master.
He prays to the featureless saints
for the husbandry of Eden
to work on primal seeds.
He’ll buy you out square, Lord
that pastures should green his brand.


Doxology

Now the song thrush forages its hour
and the glory has sounded
against what is holy.

Against the muddied,
the earth-drowned,
word-wound finger
that will not leave the wound,
but stems the water
and, embarrassed,
does not scatter its drops,
except to the wind
to unwind its breath,
but leaves the blood
to trail its path
outside wrappings
folded in waste.

Elsewhere, the cobwebs
have held
the dew
and the glory has shone
to mirror
the residue,
a silver trail,
clothed in a leaden tear
that crams the cavity
and pays the remnant its due.

Fear is
and the song has eaten its first Word.


To A Sister in Tonacatepeque

The gunshot exalts through the spheres,
but sings across the seas
how its home was made
in your breathstead.

In springtime,
its shattered Word will flower
with a whiteness
your hair will never own.

Speak of us down here,
with the man whose hair is always dark,
of your last hunger
that was never