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DE
PROFUNDIS: ON SAINT MICHAEL TRIUMPHANT OVER THE DEVIL WITH THE DONOR
ANTONIO JUAN BY BARTOLOME BERMEJO
I catch Saint Michael most nights:
moon
or no moon, cloud or clear
sky
He stands
like a prima donna
over the entrance of hell, just up the
hill
small opening or fissure or
portal
in a cairn of granite I compiled
with my own two hands. His
armour
is so ridiculously shiny, so
golden
like the wheat
crop in all its glory
before harvest, fruit of an out-of-drought
year
I see myself kneeling at his holy
side,
I, lord of
property, penitent to the last:
listen, hear and see me glow
shadow to his awesome
soul-thrust
a jewelled, deft
dance.
Until Michael appeared, each year warm
weather
brought the brown
snake
out of the
lichened and webbed snare:
a granite incubator. I too was down
there,
in the depths of salty fill. I crept
among
the roots of
York gums, knowing
why they died from their crowns
down.
I listened up through the ground,
muffled
acoustics, heard one trick ponies
gallivanting by: telling their
tales
of new technology: no more tines
like
teeth,
no
more spotlights that shine a sickly sexlight,
no more machinery of wings, armour, and
tails
polymorphously perverse,
alchemical
-
crushed
underfoot, howling, spitting
pheremones, slain. So, so hungry
-
for blood and bone, burn of
chemical
fertilizer
Saint Michael is guided by satellites.
The fallen know where they've fallen
from.
It seems so hard to tell them
apart.
Me too:
trodden down before time,
haunting grain pools and world
markets
footloose, fancy free: gorged on
light
whatever
its source. |
