The Wrecking Light Read Online Free PDF Page A

among the grain, and dogs,
but few people anywhere.
There's ice between the cobblestones
where drink was spilt — some scraps of bread,
chicken bones — that's it.
I had missed the full moon, and the Festival.
Fires sputter here and there but there is little light
and the ground beyond the square
is frozen hard as iron.
I pass what looks like a well in the darkness
— the sharpening wind playing over it
as you would blow on the neck of an empty bottle.
I hear the creaking of a tree so huge
it's blotted out the moon; some birds, scuffling;
a skitter of rats and a dog's low growl.
    As I near the tree I feel the ground soften, start
to suck at my boot-heels, and I can
make out shapes in the high branches:
long, hanging shapes that seem to
turn slightly in the breeze, which is sweet now
beyond the frost, and I almost
sense some drops of rain.
Moving around it
and into the moonlight, I see it's as high
as the temple, fully green, and thick with gifts
the way the peasants dress their beams with corn,
at home, at harvest-time. This tree, though,
is decked simply with the dead.
At the top, what look like cockerels, rams
and goats, then dogs and pigs, and hooked
to the lowest, strongest boughs — their legs
almost touching the earth — horses and bulls.
I count nine of each of them, and nine
that aren't animals but hang there just the same,
black-faced, bletted, barely
recognisable as men.
I look down at the spongy grass
and my boots are soaking red.
    My name is Adam of Bremen
and I saw these things
in The Year of Our Lord 1075.

WEB
    The wood is hung with silk anchor-
threads and signal-threads. Draglines
catch on my hair and hands, stringing
my face as I move through the trees: strands
charged and sticky as spun sugar
cling and stretch and fizzle apart.
I am ravelled here
to the live field, in a rig of stress.
    Turned on my new axis to a swathe
of shriven grey, I remind myself
of a cork float in a fishing-net spread out
to dry in the sun, waiting for the fisherman
— both
retiarius
and
secutor
—
to attend to what is broken and undone.
I watch now as the spider unknots itself
slowly, and elbows out of the dark.

THE HAMMAM
    Under the nineteen stars
and the ninety-six minor stars
of the marble heaven,
he lies crossways
on the heated stone,
his laved body evaporating
upwards to the light.
    His smoke of sweat condenses
in the dome's stone cupola
and its slow hot rain
drops down on him hard
as annunciation — or nails,
perhaps, on a sheet of tin,
pricking out some finial star.

THE ACT OF DISTRESS
    I let him
lose himself in me;
finding a way to sleep,
to disappear
out of darkness and in
to some blue light.
    I hear him
sobbing as he
nears the centre, to release
the flare, send up
the high maroon, feel it
flooding the night.

WHITE
    It wasn't meant to be that way.
I never expected it to shoot so hard
it blinded me: I'd wanted to watch
the way it went. The pumping-out not like
coming at all, more like emptying
a bottle: blacking out
a little more with every pulse.
I just felt light and very cold at the end,
astonished at how much red there was
and my wrist so white.

III. UNSPOKEN WATER

THE WOOD OF LOST THINGS
    We went walks here, as children, listening out
for gypsies, timber wolves, the great
hinges in the trees. Hours
we'd wander its long green halls
making swords from branches,
gathering stars of elderflower
to thread into a chain.
Today the forest sends up birds
to distract me, deer to turn me from the track,
puts out stems and tendrils
to trip and catch at my feet.
The sudden sun opens a path of flowers:
snowdrops, crocuses, hyacinths,
a smoke of bluebells
in the shade on either side;
a way of stamens and stigmas: the breathing
faces of flowers. I look back at the empty trees,
look up at the green, and I'm walking
through daisies and honeysuckle,
fireweed, crab apple, burnt-out
buddleia, a tangle of nettles,
berberis, bramble-wire;
the flowers gone,
just the starred calyx
and the green ovary
hardening