Seven
Laid out on a plane of dread, compounded in tales told in mobile homophones,
Comes a willingness to horror, and to kneel to the defiant liturgies once, and then, again.
Bells are laid out on a sheet of reddening bed linen, cross a map of floral stains,
A part of everything gone fictional, travelling to the pool under the bad hill; the low moans
Start up and the deep winds refuse to tell the much-puzzled trees or the speaking animals, staked out
Like pegs on a cribbage board, how much they no no no. Stop. The map has split its means, a body of veins
Lain around an abandonment, running with rimes and steam, blue lines dropped from the sky,
In a body, you know, once upon a time, how the skull dome fills with stars, and all’s a quiet tomb passing through;
It’s us in Willow Lane it’s passing through. A minnow crossing a mind, carelessly.
This flat planet will continue for just so long as it knows it doesn’t have to; then, that’s it.
It will lay down its mailed net over the porter’s head, fill it with a grid of sprawling hill
Laid out for a banquet on a spacecraft, as big as a horizon, swamping its landing stage,
Salt will spill, caught in a shawl, the tall tale thing chopped down between whistling thumbs,
The kingdom comes, and the stinging grass and the strangling of stumps, the feeding on the crumbs,
Droppings from old feasts, the place where place takes off, de-territorialised by your frozen explosion, Miranda.
The four points of the woolly compass is a fable, dissected by a surgeon-sheep, spreading its eyes to the edges
Of the compound. Then the compass is rounded up and no one knows where they are on the moor,
Without gorse or table, weight or worse. Sentries awake in bracken and focus
The lenses of their nano-machines. A white beast, alone, punctuated,
A priest de-flocked, naked of its purple power, steeples down in the hill grease, furze-strewn.
Sidling up to heaven; a toot to warn the order that this is the track where something like a long book ends,
Flailing along the network, dropping episodes down the long, long walk, it’s all OK,
All will thus be fine, no one dies. Undo the picnic box, unpick the thistle from the fleece,
Read the tunes in leadshot droppings, unstick the shrug we’ve all been hiding with
And let the awful thing fall fitfully apart; the eyes out of their sockets, four points of a squared compass, and lay
The table before your committees of friendly and supportive spies.