ERSEWARD AND AFTER (A POET'S VOYAGE) by jim bellamy
(after dylan thomas's 'Altarwise by Owl-light')
.

i
Erseward and after, in the naveward blaze,
The Nineveh of fables flapped its shrunken eye;
Eden, wrapped in stammers, scored away its garden,
And, from down the hills, the linnet swam the high
Four ways of the mare, sat in its golden meadow,
With the metronomes appealing and the clifftops bare,
Flaring and rainy, where the appled widow,
Who is the honey spider, whose mastery is rare,
Fellowed her heroes and the driver of the fairies,
Whereby the nails of Nero slashed away the hair
And, ghasting, galoshed on a ruminative trumpet
That, transcending, beheld an angelled fin,
Capricorn and Cancer revolving in their antics,
Snide-shorn and pullied in the Zodiacal Ind.

ii
Crime is time's saviour, the unit and the unicorn;
The womb that pares the bud lies sailored in the tears,
Knitted and steepled, where the humours of the lily
Ride and rise aside into the spinney of the years;
Child of childs and actor to the eyries in the emerald,
Adam and Abaddon drive the series in the flower;
Fuses flow from mammon,- red macadamed and summoned,
Hero and Leander course down the ivory tower.
Hair on head and after, funeral or master,
Doctor to doctor, the chitters in the hour
Fly the banded cricket from mantis man to wicket.
Hemlock-hived and hymened, duteous come the owls,
With Boudica and Judas hanging from a crocus
and Romeo conniving in Hamlet's cowl.

iii
First there was the theorist, rippling with Homer.
First came the purdah of thought and ideal.
First came the comber of the prayers that murder.
First came the bardic world of weals.
Now comes the horned and skull-chimed apprentice,
whittling the bull-bone as the cherry breaks,
Winded world appeasing, and the hornets in their gildings
Gashing and abashing into a cape of capes.
First came the theorist, rippling with homer.
First came the herald of the quietus in the mind.
Now comes the stolid and banished ram of reason,
And the winter in a sonnet that writes against the time.
First was the logic of sacrament and rocket;
Now the wolves of summer wreak away the spine.

iv
What is the tumour in the shadow storming river;
The sidler in a sigh; the son of eagled gender;
Whose rough fearing shall the hills surrender
To the timbre in the valleys of a wheat-shut eye?
(Wraith of phallic age, the astronauts dissemble:
Bubbling in their hate, the mortar men blow out).
What is the member in a supranatural whimper;
What the angel, what the wrangler, what the changing lout?
(Wraith of phallic age, the astronauts dissemble:
Music loses vision and the coiled stars dry).
What mad mammal love is the needle in a candle;
Which maternal measure hales the phaser in the sky?
(Wraith of phallic age, the astronauts dissemble:
Bibling in their wrath, the mortar men throe by).

v
Mammary of ashes on a scythe-scorned razor,
He who raped his mumma has a zen-skeined thigh:
Spurned by molten manna, the wick of whorlds in hammer
Anvils at the sun and rakes away the eagle's pry:
Out of crocks of nowhere, from the tides of crow-hair,
Mystic thrum the fillies and the aimless damsoned shies:
That mallow come the sparrows, marrow must grow fallow
And chaffinch with the mimics of a warbling spy:
Mary, virgin eyrie, must be scorned in theory
That the fields of adam may smelt the semblers down:
Hags that bless the lady must be burnt from maybe
And the cryptics under ridgewood scorn away the town,
Oven-head colliding and the trills of women bridling
Banished in the pumpkins of their all-too-zealous crown.

vi
Now sing hosanna for the fairies and their lammers,-
Let the bauble breeder be sirened down to sound,-
Past all riftward fate, set the shearer on the plate
And the head beneath the rosebud underground,-
Sing! now let the rod of Nineveh vibrate
And the hellcats in their sulphur, socketted round,
Run the rousting death of Helen anti-cherried;
Come set the thrillers free that the metronomic sea
Can tarnish; now sear that the ravine may not flower!
Doom inside the skull is the slit of timeless murder;
For rune and moon aside, god's heroes run aground;
Blown out of skull, god's caverns come to master;
Man and man aligned must fry to spare the town;
Doom in the skull is time's maficient martyr.

vii
Crime is the wending demesne in the garden,
The weaning whoop and the nature of the trees:
Crime runs blindly, crime is certain failure,
crime holds the gallows and crime bedims the seas:
Bent like the willow, hurdy-gurdy minnows,
Plashed in the transept, sweep the sirens round:
Crime runs madly, crime unlicks the lady,
Crime roams Eden into a hovelled ground:
Bent on coming into a world of nothing,
Bent and bent again on running evil's sound,
Crime is the traitor, the wrangle and the satyr,
The sallow rage and rave of the ebbing lounge
That rocks the rotten crucifix demented:
Crime is the Herod in the tiers of time unbound.

viii
From the high hills to the crescent in the window,
From the oracular to the whittled verb of days,
Out of a centaur came the horseman's pedal
That rode; out of summer there came a stave!
And time lay roofed in nettled groves of metal,
High and slandered by, on a kettled rose of graves,
Rhythm all-appeasing and the active word of searing
Shining down the hilltops and into heaven's laves.
Clockhands spoke to manna, were rented of their stammer
And turvied round the handsomes of the haloed law;
Nineveh decreasing and the musics in a ceiling
Gliding out of sight into a revelled raze of ore;
Time dying and water flailing from its daughter
And signing on the line for crime and all its yore.

ix
Let the graveward tailor lie naveward with his furies:
Chapeline and maidened, may the bastard sailor split:
Chanticleer is weathered! now let the rotes of pleasure
Rake up their seagull gears and angle into pit:
Crown of dawns and thorns in the angled spawn,
Chanticleer and weather redeem all fulsome hates!
Green is the beginning and green is heaven's ending;
Greenly wharve the waters and greenly spoil the lakes!
Green is the beginning and green is heaven's spleening;
Greenly wharve the towers and the harvest under fear,-
Toward the lap of fate flow the furnaces of Israel
And searing come the scars of the all too empty tear,-
Crime is neither manna nor toxic turning steeple,-
Mannawise, the word is as poisoned as a sphere.

x
Now the hymns are written and the law lies fairied.
Ten magnetic fingers plant the heroed ground.
Heaven lies contrary to the hellfire and its prairies.
Rhyme and tide alike hereby entreat the sound.
This is the hymen that opens for The Lady.
Heralded by trumpets, the jonquilled angels sing!
Heaven on earth is what the preacher's story
Rides upon this world of seraphs on the wing!
Now the hymns are written and the law lies fairied.
Ten magnetic fingers plant the heroed ground.
Heaven lies contrary to the hellfire and its prairies.
Crime and tide alike hereby revile their hound:
And life, as lovely as life itself is lonely,
Charms the sacred snake. We snap the town?

xi
Crime is state and crime is molten master.
Suffered by the seas, the flight of crime is round.
Flare after flare, the hymnals in the chimneys
Ride the slaughter boatmen into haloed mound.
Crime is state and crime is molten master.
Suffered by the undead crucibles of fate,
Crime and tide alike row madly through the pasture.
Flare after flare, the hymnals roll and rake.
Crime is state and crime is molten master.
Crime steers the orbit that makes the sirens bang.
Crime is both a master and a cryptic fastener.
Crime and tide alike trip greyly through the sand.
Crime after crime, the runes contract their sentries.
Crime after crtime, the sentries clasp the hand.

xii
The voyage is over, the knaveward blaze distracted.
Razed from darksome waters, the ship of time is troved.
Snipped from the decks, the wrecks of blood and mortar
Wind their rending ways into the hillside's lobes.
The voyage is over, the naveward blaze distracted.
Crime after time, despising heroes smile.
Snipped at the decks, the wrecks of blood and mortar
Wind their rending ways into the hills of bile.
Ended and after, opened by crime's closing,
Dowsed and regaled come the jewdrops and the rain:
Crime and tide alike float wryly and reposing:
Hammer into anvil is the music in the brain.
The voyage is over, the naveward blaze distracted.
In the shard-suckled hills, the slips of reason flame?

...

jdb 1998