Sunday 15 June 2014

King's Quoit

Three red eyes shine in the black hill
While from the graveyard dunes
A tuneless wind of unhearable fairy music
Played on pipes of razorshell and netting
Reaches the ear

From the railway sand rise spikes
Of purple darts and trumpets firing heart-ceasing smoke
In trembling clouds

One green eye,
The rattle of legs beneath broomhead wings

A low growl from the stones
And above it a whistle through the teeth of an animal
The howling overture to
The Bait Diggers of 1933

With scorched fingers and velvet wood thighs
The clambering horses rise in dry and powdery lusts
From the shore
The predatory bonecrawling forms
Prise their way out of the burrows
In search of sleeping flesh
The lip skin bulbs of sparkling trowel heads
Shimmer to the lover’s touch
The washed skin ripples with swollen deep sea memories

The sunken toeprints of a man dropped into soft sand
On a beach of green moustaches

There are burnt hooves washed up in the foam
While the fetish sticks are black with use
And each round stone is a carved Ogham map

Later, in the time of hollow mountains
When minutes shine gold against a sky with its eyes shut,
The fairy horns sound again
Reveille for the naked monks
A recall to the 8 o’clock rock they cannot pass

My heart is the unknown hero lying under the cromlech
It slips away, down through the sand,
With each gulping peristaltic beat

My hair falls in pigeon wings behind my head
Fingers bristling with the dry spears
Hurled from the clifftops
Diving through fields surrounded by the mystery smoke

The reptile flowers coil around me
In the holes through walls and bushes
Where whistling echoes on the glowing face
And in numerous pairs we see
The murk ascending