Crow on the ground—
In his pecking lob sidle walk,
Struts with airs unlanding
On the sleeping lawns.

His black eyes are sideways,
Eyeing me as I watch—
What a rude intruder.
Is it me or is it he?

I make my coffee—
At a window into his world,
He waits, wades with indifference,
Goading the flighty songbirds.

The blackness moves—
With the dimming, trailing sun,
So many things left unknown,
Crown on the ground.

10 Haiku of Raven

        1
black God

Huge cumulus clouds,
Exploding into the blue,
  .  .  .  Shadowed by raven.


        2
valley morn

Dark hands working fields,
Raven tracing mountain crests,
  .  .  .  Carnal tillers wake.


        3
Raven spell

Dark sound raven makes,
Chortles top fir tree, haunting—
  .  .  .  Druids incantation.


        4
unfaithful

Snow covers valley—
Solitary raven staining world,
  .  .  .  Love has turned black.


        5
outcast

Many years alone,
Suddenly— old thoughts of her,
  .  .  .  Lone raven in sky.


        6
mischief

Lone raven cackles  .  .  .
Clouds splinter across the sky,
  .  .  .  Mist cuts down the woods.


        7
marked

Full moon crowns tall pine,
Raven landing in cross hairs,
  .  .  .  Dark angels halo.


        8
Loki

Raven knows a charm,
A child's costume jewelry,
  .  .  .  Colours a black eye.


        9
tall tale

Zenith of winter—
Lone raven in naked tree,
  .  .  .  Spring only legend.


       10
dark angel

In his feathered dress  .  .  .
Raven shrouds beneath the clouds,
  .  .  .  Even eyes are black.

There is no awakening.  Outside the cave
Light shadows in the sun, a blinding
Muck veils desolation in the vein-bled,
Good men, stumps of the naked forests,
And bird song drowned by the droning dead,
Ignoble, this is no country for old men.

In the open, all lie freely, lacquered clean
Sunning social graces, shine pornographic,
Know truth is real yet, embalmed by speakers,
Pages, their flame a cross, churning in a mire,
Our glass cities run time mendaciously silent;
The euphony of the untruths, the bent sign.

In Catatonia words are watered but never
Change, sapped of meaning, seasons fall
By the handy green, the spring leaves, tipped
Off balance scaled to autumns teeming news;
The barren shores, breaks, bless the vacuum
Tubes, and pray a curse, fawn the head lamps.

In the homeless land anxious creatures divide.
The concrete utterance is picked to rubble.
The stones ground into sand and we ringing
In delight, moving mandrake, mobile cadavers,
Orbit to satellite are digging babylon down
In the false hood, ****** by the mortar.

The ruin architects mark, fork millions
Of tongues in tributary, as does a great
River from a stony source.  The sterling
Feed their stock with tainted food, plants
Regenerate the mangled codex twining-tare;
Throws the babe with baptismal waters.

In the soulless land children peak abandoned,
They fall on temple steps by the golden mean.
We pattern the sky in the bold fabric of pity
And mercy but the strands fade out running;
Our cruel and only kind would rend the stars,
Would fallow Elysium, bleed gold to the vein.

How did we end mortal under the divining
Sun?  Down base our provident ways watching?
We wave in fealty to the dominion of spins
And shadow, gussied Gods so proudly made,
Desolate, vain, air escaping to whisper;
We are sailing from Byzantium.

1

The chards rising.  Am I the praying bird?
In the gleaming sun my bones are negative,
My flesh a cypher walking through the plains
As ghost I move, my dark lord, above me
Flocks swirl and spike. I stand accused,
Your pointed face divining oblivion,
And no redemption in the rains of my
Cliff walk days.


2

I see my shroud pinning on the wires
His legs are razored forks spinning my
Compass from True North. Your dark brush-
Fire wings, the swept wind, wheels and strings
My fate. Such black rhetoric in a burn,
Your caws, loosed perches, on the stakes, picks
My crowning grave. Black dove, your feathers finger
As they slice.


3

Smoke, the cardinal blood caries my teething
Bone, spades my hand without a flight.
Taut, the pulled noose my hooded one
I see my scarecrow’s reflexion, the scar,
Let blood, the seeded droppings end trailed
To my door. Feathers, ferry to carry on
Dowsing downward, black knight of down, to sticks
On extended wings.

The whole world is a sea—
A great ball of green blue eye
Watching the skies with a watery
Gleam in the round and swirling
Aye, the sea is a sauce, quivering
In the bowl of heaven and clouds
Are blushing with rivers run flushing
Waters older than the gold of stars,
Into the sea.  I see that hushed time
Is flowing as it all revolves with tides
And birds, white as snow and foams
Pure as dreamed downy wind, wings
Long, sure, set for a choppy pilgrim's
Sea journey, swaying with the stages,
Always breezy, sliding as fish do flying
In her rounding depths and her gusty
Crests and all are riddled as mariners
Who travel on her spindrift ways, days
Of the dizzying sun and steamy springs,
We all go step into deepest end, darkling
Fathoms of slip, those eventual afterwhens,
Riding the sunk, fabled under-ocean streams,
In mangled kelps of weeds, into the murky wave.

The Blue Falcon, cross the spire,
Waits in the gables of the white
House.  Wounded in youth by crush
Of air, spent, a wisp perched
In the aerie dark with a view of mountains
Blue as ice under glacier.  The wooden
Church from the other side clutches
The sky but the Falcon blue is lost
In a tuft of cloud that bobs but never
Kills.  On this strike he is sheathed in stealth
The dull talons slip as they dry
In the tented air, the songbirds at play
In the high-ground underneath warble
And chide but the Falcon cannot hear
The Falcon near.  His heart is soft
And muted in the breast, his ears
Are dumb to their tickling-songs.  

Before the Falcons time, over
The tilling fields, dropped his world
In the spoils where splendour burst in green,
Rain meant the feathers ran and the woods,
A banquet of game, were bounty's breach
Fording blue currents he was
A fisher in the sun, but the sun
Sank in his drowning sky no store
From plateau to quarry the drought of days
Moved a castle felled in the dancing
Dust, his wings broke in the shuttered
Eye of the sun and etched his form
Into grey silhouette.  

Now, the Blue Falcon, jeered
In the branches of the rooted air
Above the yellowed grass, under the pines
And a great blue mountain, stirs a Druid
Shape, vaporous, in the cauldron
Of the attic in the white house
A throw of stones crossways from
The sacred yews of the steeple spire.

Body of ocean, milk and sky,
We are tangled in the hope of night.
The lips of the milky way, creaming us,
Stains and is **** with a taste keening;
All is creation.  My meteors crash
Into your ruptured Earth.  I flame
Upon your must and moisted furrows
And my toes are locked, rooted in yours.

Body of ocean, milk and sky,
In the deserts of the day you are true
Oasis.  The curves and waft of your sands
Seethe and sodden my barren plains,
Are erasing all my wandering memories
Of an endless sky and now your eyes
Are the only stars I know, and your skin;
A sheet that holds the heavens shimmering.

Body of ocean, milk and sky,
Your ******* are the heaving of grasses
And wind, loft and laden in the rounded
Hills, a hoard of ****** bread, bountiful,
Ripe and strange.  Your hair is an endless
Savannah, your valleys are gold and honeyed
With milk, seared, filled by my penetrating sun.
In passion we play; low on earth and deep in sky.