| From the book The Wild Rose | Legends and Fantasies
(1976 - 1978) |  |
| Three Mirrors | 1. A Woman at The Mirror
A woman appears by the mirrors
not from below, but from behind some door,
half opened into the consecrated hall,
from true materials, as true as a child’s name,
like the real truth from many beliefs.
She stood and looked screwing up her eyes
as though she was threading a needle
with the twisted thread of destiny and a body –
and then she suddenly forgot herself and the thread whistled
and hundreds of needles started falling in the darkness.
A hundred things were returning with a bow
to the pine branches, enraptured in the darkness
and so sympathising with this battle
of love incarnate against the in-love look –
and I was thinking, surprised at myself:
if there was no shame and no deathly boredom,
no life of mine, hanging from hands,
I would cast everything before you like a piece
of material, woven by the light, and suddenly
it would immediately soar like a crowd of birds.
I would tell every form:
you can kill, but go and be merciful.
You can go simply, but go with miracles,
disappear, like a mirror before the eyes, and beat in the chest, simply like a heart.
She got up, and covered her face
with her hands: that which was in her face
which was in her hands, all that darkness
passed, like fate over a free creation,
and this could appear to be sobbing,
but was a vision that drove one mad.
2. Old House
The spirit of a thousand disasters in the corridors,
and the fur coats were full of collapse,
when, rummaging in their weeping heap,
you sense that your life is no longer beside you,
but there in the attics, deprived of someone,
like beads and rings from a burial,
where an inner terror sits working
to bring to the light and make a move.
“Listen to me, I am a needless name,
I am a hereditary ghost, a dream from afar,
where the shades jostle among the living
and carry on an ancient squabble
with fate, which is eternally searching for sacrifice,
living eternally in spacious spaces.
Why then was it reflected here, like a dead man,
in the underground lakes of blood-building glands?
Will we too, in the extinguished light,
write to the end the story of death and flesh?
Will I too read, like these,
the fragile book in a damp cover?”
There is a hostile town within human beings,
powerful walls, in love with decay,
and there, raising a last echo,
the strangely alive plant is opening.
3. The Prophet
“Let them know how Your image wrings its hands,
when there is darkness around and the fractured water
flies and flies and no longer has any desires,
but falling gets here in its entirety.
Let them know how the terrible heart triumphs
already moving, going out of its mind,
how it wrings its hands, how it flies into no darkness,
that darkness that is in horror with itself.
Swallowing life like a grave insult,
and getting lost among former people,
it will brandish itself as with David’s heart,
with my sickness, my roof and my skin.
What happened, happened to me. And worse:
to everyone about everyone and on everyone’s lips,
endlessly it perfects me, like a weapon
of any mercy
and agreement at a stroke.” | | Richard McKane | |
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