Anima/Animal

Time was when the gnarled

canker of the poplar tree,

the grotesque blemish

of lips on a fish,

the warm red stain

on a tiger’s tooth,

and the savage rite of thunder

brought revulsion to her soul.

 

Like the schoolmen, speaking

from the sacerdotal dust

with dead dry lips,

her conclusion was always clear:

grace perfects nature, and nature

signifies the righteous and the good.

 

But a dark turn of thought

came like a thief;

a dark dynamic perceived

in the workings of nature:

natura naturans—

nature doing what it will;

artless, murderous, free,

free from an order of Being

crowned by an absent apex.

 

'What is the purpose of Being', she mused,

'if Being is nothing more than becoming?

Can I ever step into the same river twice?'

Winter’s mind revealed the answer.

 

Ever since the turn,

and ever since the breath

of that white winter

spoke to soul,

the prodigies of nature

and the entrails of their truth

shape a close connection

to her depths, bringing

freakish calm and consolation.

 

 

The blinking advent from a cave,

an all too human

hibernation, breathes in its wake

the frosted air of fact.

And to the brazen hoof

the frost inspires a deviation

from perpendicular paths,

strewn with sentimental buds

coloured kitsch by the words—

at once sublime and trite—

of romantic preconceptions.

Far from reckless musings

of a poetaster’s fancy, the crooked way

invites the flesh-destroying claw.

 

No solidarity with the sun

can be established; it burns

her back and shines outside

the confines of her creature world;

and with the stars and moon

becomes irrelevant to the quest.

 

For what she seeks, and what

she needs to feel, is the hot red rush

of primal blood; the bequest

of the beast at the cusp of dawn,

descending through the veins of earth

to the core of its becoming.

A congress of soul and earth. Her veins

sink ruptured, deep in reddened soil

infested with sarcophagi

of unmourned mundane bones.

 

Freedom of the fierce—

or rather, licence of the brute—

gives her the grace, an earthly grace,

to slough off ancient skin

and stand apart from human herds

and sundry other mobs deemed

consequential to the race.

 

‘To walk in integrity, I crouch like a beast,

but a beast alone, away from the herd.

Bad company ruined me

and also ruined the race.

But the race must hang in any case,

and the race that hangs is forever cursed’.

 

The shadow rises

with the falling of the sun.

There is music in the beating

of the blood. An encounter with this shadow

in the morning of the beast:

blessed, so blessed

by the Edenic richness

of blood and sacrifice.

For all the blood,

a portrait of the paradise

presents a masterpiece of soothing;

an analgesic for the penitent sting

of manufactured values.

 

‘What are mores but a mask for vice?

And isn’t virtue a mask for the same?

As the fierce fighter said,

justice is the preserve of the strong,

and is preserved by the sinews

of animal strength’.

 

There is a rising in her mind.

 

‘To forsake the human

is not inhuman; not when

the masculine wear a beast’s face

beneath a clown mask.

The clown is always a malevolence;

He paints his lips with children’s blood.

 

I am a forest, and a night of dark trees,

but I am not afraid; I embrace the darkness

of the self and soul.

But I am more, and with the last

scrawl of the claw,

on the last tree in the dark,

I will scratch an epigraph

to breach the next beginning,

a trinity of words, unholy:

I am animal’.