to heaven and am reborn

in two seconds with hair brushed the other way

in two seconds the bridge goes bifocal,

a split

persona: one half windy upper road,

the other half pier. The river is pilloried

in red stocks of masonry, its arms and legs

double-jointed, blue.

Wool-proofed against the excesses of the rain god’s bladder,

droves of lambs brim daily over the lip

of the broken bridge, led to sacrifice by an old man

shaking a withered flail and not

the harlequin piper of another town, another poem.

Their frisking is the dance before the dance

of the knives. They troop past the vultures of the Small Causes Court.

III.

The wall floats on the wind,

a snake god going home

on a ripple of news from a queen

delivered of child, an oracle’s gift:

a prince of herons and tigers.

From my bus window, the athlete wall

seems almost to sprint as if from Marathon

to Athens it had to bear word of triumph,

then sink to its knees, dead.

The wall wears leopard skin for small warmth

in the rain outside my patch of sight.

One of its panels says in anaemic poster red:

AMOHOL.

A sign pruned of President Bush[whack] doing his bit

for the oil companies – you back my scratch,

I’ll back yours – and yet the logo

seems imported from a Midwestern freeway,

blown here perhaps by cosmic winds.

Or might it be an ad for ammunition perfected in the Balkans,

or some Asiatic derivative of nerve gas or defoliant?

A byproduct got upon the many-tongued She

of fire and skulls, nooses and broadswords,

by bald scientists behind steel-plated doors?

Anagram, crossword clue,

the sign mosaics in the shower.

The lustrum restores the real name:

A. MOHOL.

Timed with dying bleats, the loose-scrawled motion

identifies a candidate for next month’s election.

Such invariables as the returning officer’s tent, the sack of flour,

the bottle of hooch and the quick boot for the press-ganged voters

dissolve in diesel smoke when the bus

booms past wall, past panel, past tea stall and trellis:

with a half-moon swipe of his wiper,

the driver abolishes the candidate

and like a dream of blue hills,

blue hills hit the windshield.

IV.

Everything I hear is a track on the fictioner’s disc.

Everything I read is fury gift-wrapped in zinc.

Everything I dream is cement picked out in neon.

Everything I sing is about Babel and Zion.

The house with the squat chimney on the concrete plateau

is as abstract as it gets. Actually, it’s an Assyrian bull

stamping his front paws in defiance of the distant hills.

And those hills are really an army of pyramids

in camouflage, on the march, no one the wiser,

and the spies in the sky who are running this show

are feline in their intrigue.

Look how they draggle the horizon until it bleeds

banners of saffron cloud.