THE FIRST DEATH

III
Dead jaws biting on wintry streams
Broken teeth where the victim’s tremor
Has disinterred their roots before adoring the hook
Around the imprints of the ecstasy and the desolation
Among the hecatomb’s aged branches
They are spread like a net toward the pallid sky
Which like a trembling kiss falls from your lips;
Regiments of the dead whispering unceasingly
In a limitless graveyard, within you
Too you can no longer speak, you are drowning
And the familiar pain touches
Outlets in the untrodden body
Now you can walk no longer –
You crawl, there where the darkness is deeper
More tender, carcass
Of a disembowelled beast
You embrace a handful of bed-ridden bones
And drift into sleep.


X
Because you can no longer stay
because your vision allows the idols to writhe
until the lake congeals, until your hand ceases
to poke among the gizzards and the burning coals
seeking a useless axe
and let the sea scratch the dried blood;
Dismissal.
Because you are looking for the mountain and the nails beneath the stars
black crosses leaning towards the triumph
and once more you crawl and
scramble on the earth's wounds
spitting sulphur which cauterizes your limbs
panting as once upon the whores,
watering the lustful sandbanks
and the croaking of the birds of prey accompanies
the defilement; ecstatic on the mountain.
And the moist stings of the scorpions
show the way
and the mind a map dipped in wine
and the soul within its muzzle
suckling
the further horizon of pain.

Poena Damni, The First Death. With six masks by Friedrich Unegg. Translated by Shorsha Sullivan. Shoestring Press, Nottingham, 2000.