rustling.

Do the birds speak?
They’ve told me of your augury,
and I have mentioned prophecy;
there is no overlap

between such songs.
Voice of the sky’s vast life,
clear, bright and true,
or puppetry,
ventriloquy,
your tomes of magic rhetoric
devised. Fables
and lies, set to
music.

Dreams and shadows
breathlessly divide.
Asleep, I woke to Maytime
ringing with the tinkling
murmur, singing
to the coloured glass
of glory and desire,
poetry;
crowds of choir perched
cheerfully near my room,
enamoured
in the morning fire
of autumn worlds
beneath the world.

Such enjoyment.
Dreams, like vapour, often
swim away.

Gulls
on the snowy sea,
in sleet
and fleeting gold
of older days;

that April steals
our maiden queens to
truer, brighter fields.
Are they winding themselves
into circles?

Binding themselves
to the ring gold of fever,
ruby-deep, their fate’s delight
and ruin,
swan-bright.

Wheeling, the eagle
of sight, in this dream,
pierced the crowd of swans
in the clamour and night;
water and flight,
death all confused!

So it was
among my sleep.
"Do not trust them,
flitting wings
of everything
and of nothing
at once."

Here is all we feel
and love,
awoken into naught.
Mountains carried
wailing cries
from the heavens,
and wrinkled eyes of stars
wept for an age gone by.

Birds collapsed mid-flight
and fell,
fell to the ground,

broken
yet alive.
Bind them, wind them
in waking,

find an essence
fallen true.

Earth and sky are telling
the rumours and movements
of what is inside.
Eagerly they fly
the road of heights,
of rising
from all that collides.

The dream is fled!
There are no markers
except for delight;
watch them. You will need
no magic. Listen
faithfully:

two on wing
fly often by, in
such a song, each one
pressed near her brother.

Stars are soaring bright
in the inky low tide
of dissolving silence.