Smith - Auguries of Innocence

I saw you who was myself slightly stooped whistling mouth with leather sack and breeches brown striding the naked countryside with summer bones long and dry into the breadth of our glad day mid afternoon the longer night as you tread bareheaded bright I saw you a wraith bemoan stir the fires of the ancient ones scarred with sticks pome and haw as the nectar for their script I saw you walk the length of fields far as the finger of Providence far as the mounds we call hills ranges cut from the heart of slate I saw you dip into your sack scattering seeds where they may as the woodsman hews his way through oak ash and variant pines for writing desks that shall reflect a sheaf of lines that speak of trees all sober hopes required within all drunkenness as sacred swims I saw the book upon the shelf I saw you who was myself I saw the empty sack at last I saw the branch your shadow cast

On the edge of a pasture in a confusion of stones, obscured by the long grass and floramour, the footprint of horror cloven and drawn. She had a beautiful name: freedom. Pretty little chop. Unmarketable, light the bleating of new life. He loved her mouth, tiny feet dressed in pleats.

Hearing her cry, he picked her up by the stem of her throat in his thick arms slick with dew. And he, a governed soul, broad shouldered with eyes like Blake, lamented who bred thee, nursed thee on mead and flowers, as he ripped her apart. The barn was burning an indifferent hell, engulfing little maids in their curly coats. The field and fell lay empty as the heart. He called to his god gasping for breath we abandoned the farms we culled, cut the cord, incinerated our little ones. We did it for love we did it for man, the hawthorn and the cuckoo, the footpaths of Cumbria.

We did it for a beautiful name. freedom, baa baa baa, nothing you could put your finger on.

The dodo sleeping, dreaming of himself, lost in his daily doings. His wife mounted in a menagerie of mogul extremes. His children born and slain for sport, with nary a nod save the wind, echoing an old dance tune. Funny squawks: coracoo, coracoo swept by mist into the grotto, the sugar plantation.

Funny beaks bobbing the swamps dreaming pond. Comic bodies washed up on the craggy shore. Funny bones, then no more. The sun hung, bled into the clouds. Gods bloodshot eyes, such sad surprise. The dodo awoke, and seeing them, slowly closed his own again.

Out of this world, into the indistinct memory of a line that had forgotten itself.

Here we had best on tiptoe tread While I for safety march ahead. ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON We tramped in our black coats, sweeping time, sweeping time, sleeping in abandoned chimneys, emerging to face the rain. Wet, bedraggled, a bit gone, trudging the grooves, chewing bulbs, we were so hungry, tulips blazed with ragged petals. We adorned ourselves in pennywort, slogged til spent the elected front, the whisper of a trail we somehow knew, rain that was not rain, tears not yet tears. And the grail, oh the grail was just this close, finished with foil, wrapped in sun.

Gladiolas were in bloom, bursting from every crack. The whole world anxious for holy mother to inspect our chins with this familiar song Do you like butter? Oh you like butter then set upon a hill yellow everywhere. We mounted horses, rambled forests mischievous fairies danced underfoot. Branches snapped in our faces. Our kingdom behind a chain link fence We grappled in the quarries, polished marbles, knelt and shot for spoils in fervent circles. We set up our furious camps, our tents punctured with pegs, nicked with pocket knives little foxes gauging the hard earth, cursing the bottomland for making us soft.

We gathered rye, stuffed sacks, made pillows for our men. We wrung the blood from soaking beds, covered the martyrs rolling heads, balanced the buckets filled to the brim, and we saw nothing and everything. We rode on the back of the great bear, dipping our ladle into the milky liquor spread like a white lake before us. Our ships boasted obscenities scribbled on parchment sails, floating illiterate rivers overturned in bloody pools of rainwater muck. We blew songs of praise into horns of sacred animals catcalls, confessions, teenage prayers woven into tapestries of cloistered gardens. No mother had we now, and rapping infinitesimal threads, vows erupted with a new violence bearing no ill will save to be bornour allegiance to motion and the movement of the stars.

A blue light projected from the cap of a being we could no longer name. We climbed the stairs into a bluer heaven scarred with streamers, bleeding the wind. We savored the spectacle. Then it disappeared, but we were already gone. We possessed a new radiance. Dew dropped from our noses.

We boasted shining skin, shedding it without a sigh. Some raised their lanterns. Some seemed to walk in a light of their own. Fiery mounds that were not mounds, on the horizon Drawing closer we fell upon masses of greatcoats abandoned by admiralty, deposed kings purple, medals of honor, regulation boots of dog tongue leather, chits, animal hides, ermine and fleece worn by those of high rank, princes and pilots, the magus and mystic. Yet no rank had we fishing glad rags woven by the blind. Ours was a country of sockets.

They were empty. And yet within one would find all a child hopes our own sweet story, our own sweet life, cut with the cloth of ecstatic strife. Once we knew where we were going, we leapt in consecrated coats. We could have gone on forever if not for this and that pulling at the starch of our sleeves. We broke our mothers heart and became ourselves. We proceeded to breathe and therefore to leave, drunken, astonished, each of us a god.

Now you turn out the light. Press your thumb to the wick. If it sticks, you will burn. If it goes poof, you will turn into a beam that will extinguish with the night into a dream peppered with gimcracks. We saw the eyes of Ravel, ringed in blue, and blinking twice. We sang arias of our own, bummers chanting dead blues of hallowed ground and mortal shoes, of forgotten infantries and distances never dreamed yet only as far as a human hill, turned for wooden soldiers stationed in the folds of blankets, only as far as a siblings hand, as far as sleep, a fathers command the long road my children.

We broke from our moth husks alive in the night, the sky smeared with stars we no longer see. A childs creed stitched on handkerchiefs God does not abandon us we are all he knows. We must not abandon him, he is ourselves the ether of our deeds. The whistling hobo calls, sweeping time, sweeping time. We sleep. We scheme, pressing the vibrant string.

Happily self conscious, we begin again.

Awoke in a light not known before the lodgings glass door mirroring a likeness not hoped to glimpse again clouds of my childhood, clouds of God that supported the feet of Jesus Christ ascending the brush of Raphael. The young on their motorbikes do not lift their heads nor cry: The clouds, the clouds. They are always thereMediterranean arias mounting with swift and terrible calm. Do they know me? Do they know I am here, scribbling as they are decomposing? The moon rises filled with moon blood drawn from the Italian skies. Here Byron unwound his turban and shook out his locks as gulls dropped into the sea.