Caitriona O'Reilly

The secretive hart turns at bay,
lowers his tines to the hounds' cry.
The sword enters the bull's heart—
still he stands,
amazed on the red sand
as the stony unbeliever might,

who has seen God. Soon now
horns will sound dedow
for the unmaking. Beaters flush
the grey heron
like a coney from its warren,
the peregrine's jet eyes flash.

They go ringing up the air,
each in its separate spiral stair
to the indigo rim of the skies,
then descend
swift as a murderer's hand
with a knife. Death's gesture liquefies

in bringing the priestly heron down.
Her prize, the marrow from a wing-bone
in which she delights, her spurred
fleur-de-lys tongue
stained gold-vermilion—
little angel in her hangman's hood.
...

They'd barely emerged from the deep-green forests
of that epauletted century. Geraniums bloomed on windowsills in Heidelberg.
Student princes eyed the tavern keeper's daughter through the blond foam
of their tankards. The future must have seemed weightless
as it came nosing through the clouds, smooth as a biblical fish
throwing its giant shadow on the sea floor, its thin gold-beater's skin
pressed back against its ribs, cloche-hatted women in fox furs
waving through its observation windows. Composed of too much

dream stuff to be echt matériel, shoals of them congregated silently
over London in the moon's dark phases, concealed above clouds.
Their crews were unnerved by crackling blue halos; eerie lightning
shot from frostbitten fingers as they lowered spy baskets
on trapeze wires below the cloud cover, taking careful soundings,
then dropped their antique payloads on the gaping population.
Those whom they did not kill scarcely believed in them,
improbable contraptions the parchment-yellow color of old maps,

vessels a rational traveler might have chosen, a half-century earlier,
to pursue daft, round-the-world steampunk wagers. But for them — 
the gilded aerialists in their giant dirigibles — the world remained a storybook
unfolding endlessly in signs and wonders, over which they drifted
in stylish accidie; leviathan hunters, relaxed as Victorian naturalists.
And up there everything looked different:
the borders absurd, the people in their witch-fearing villages as 
out-of-date
as peasants in a medieval breviary. The mountains, too, seemed surpassable,

offering an alternative angle on the sublime. Occasionally there was concern:
a tear in the fabric, hooked to a typhoon's tail above the China Sea,
or harried by storms across the Atlantic. But how lighter than air they were.
They did not understand, as they fell continually upwards,
how the nature of the element was the price of their rising:
the assiduous atom seeking an exit, thronging the fabric of their cells.
Witness was the privilege of the many: newsreels captured the death of a star
and — oh the humanity! — its last leisurely plummet in fire, its ashen armature.
...

The fine annealed glass of the Bishop's Eye,
under the pull of centuries, is said to flow downwards
like very slow tears, to pool at the base of panes


where its colours thicken: tincture of iron oxide, taint
of arsenic, the cursèd cobalt. Nor can dense incense,
nor can the sanctified waters of Jordan, asperged,


hope for long to rise. Words; accoutrements.
And these fine-fretted lacework tubes, on closer inspection,
come not from the grab-bag of Victoriana,


stitched by hand on three bone needles, but from the lung-
collapsing weight and depth of oceans, against which,
de profundis, their miracle skeletons arise.


Spicule after spicule, in the manner of spoked snowflakes
repeating, fashion a spun-glass high-rise, in which (marriage-
bed or mausoleum) a pair of symbiotic shrimp see out their lives.


So it will gather silica to build its body,
as its name - Euplectella Aspergillum - contains a vessel
for the holiest water, a spore unbreathable as ground glass;


as with such occult intimacy the light becomes the leaf,
and the silicate sand, struck by branched lightning, vitrifies
to coralline glass: an effulgence, a lamp lighting the deep.
...

You'd take it for zero, or nothing,
or the spotless oval your lips make saying it,
as if you blew both yolk and albumen
through its pin-pricked head: the meat
of the word made orotund and Latinate.
It's like putting your mouth to the smooth
breast of the ocarina, from oca, the goose,
hooting out its fledgling notes.
Unless you seal the gap it's left, they fall
out, those other o-words, like bubbles
streaming through a soapy blow-hole:
from oblation and obloquy to oxlip and ozone,
and that sneaky Trojan obol,
coin-shaped, it's true, but spawned
from the spiky Greek of obelus,
the death-mark, dagger or crucifix,
as phallic and obvious, now that you say it,
as that double o in spermatozoon,
which enters by its own locomotion -
the flagellum, its tiny whip and scourge.
...

I bruise my knuckles
against its smooth white walls.


Containment is in
the nature of a house,


but I would sooner
the berserker's filthy pelt,


sooner swallow hot coals
as proof against the blunt


force of iron, sooner a door
in the two-chambered brain


to let the dark in still
and through which the owl


might issue its summons.
The wound of the mouth closes.


To perish its roots
A radiant stone is placed on the tongue.
...

Those from Aleppo were bitterest,
yielding the vividest ink. More permanent
than lampblack or bistre, and at first pale grey,
it darkened, upon exposure,
to the exact shade of rain-pregnant clouds,
since somewhere in the prehistory of ink
is reproduction: a gall-wasp's nursery,
deliberate worm at the oak apple's heart.
We knew the recipe by heart for centuries:
we unlettered, tongueless, with hair of ash,
the slattern at the pestle, the bad daughter.
But all who made marks on parchment or paper
dipped their pens in gall, in vitriol; even
the mildest of words like mellow fruitfulness,
of supplication like all I endeavour end
decay equally in time with bare, barren, sterile;
the pages corroding along all their script
like a trail of ash (there is beauty in this)
as the apple of Sodom, the gall, turned
in the hand from gold into ashes and smoke.
...