Alchemisland

Relentless October

Colder, wishing it over

The world looks older, scrapes like poor ogham along a mason’s old apron

This Winter’s wizened, ice-crystalled visage

April is far and all fancy glamours of field and plant abjure standard

Groves sworn eternal at Summer’s turn, lovers swarming like linnets

To a burn, trysting, moaning for minutes in the limnal zone

Between the hallowed sapling trail, pale in December

And lined with railings of bonesure ice, and the road

Where night-dispelling cars pass in flaming arks, windblown embers

All green now going, growing impedes all climbery stymied knee-height

Naked and abstemious as Godless night, resolving to endurance

Night resorting ever to the lurid and impure as its lures

Nude in surety of that posture’s all-allure

All the world seems a foetid sewer save here, I embrace nothing important

Thin clouds like steam allowing from an alchemist’s burntbottom retort

Owls in flight at extension, like Christ at passion’s end, sending screeches

To the treetops and higher reaches, where spheres too are screaming

Doleful threnodies, dirges for lost Eden

Lotus-posed the foliate Lord arose, cloven and horned

The month feels rapid, static and indistinct, overinked

The days endless, the weeks take seconds

Nothing marked off my checklist, feeling I’ve aged decades

Looking upon my lawn, where baulk bald trees like poor scrawls

Poor scribes inscribed in margins of vast encoded Bibles

How forlorn this season, how prolonged this unease

Blank and grey, heavy slate, erased a single sentence, torn out page

Hair summered at shoulders shorn

Uncovered, once-worn, ere-sworn thorn crown torn down

All plans promising soon hatching abort when spent leaves cascade

Apporting floorward, like spectral coins at the zenith of a seance

Floral scents purportedly signal the arrival of the dead

Them years demised decaying worm-ate in a humid grave

Did not one lamb warn magusChrist of stink in Lazarus’ cave?

Trees in maven phases, craven less with age shed greying capes

Littering gravel lanes between graves, nothing gifted for all I gave

Nothing gained, nothing saved, ancient paves leading me astray

Trees in the way, gnarled and ancient with brindled faces

Swaying gaoth ag séideadh, whiter pale shades

Emerge beneath hacked back fading bracken

Attached nettles brittlewithering, their attack routed

This weather attracts grouse and mice to our grounds

The cat being less often without the house on rounds

Prowls our landings as if they were sands on landing grounds

Imagining in his own proudness battle sounds, I could catch an owl

If only gravity would allow it, at predators ten times his size he scowls

Bowling toward, his defence going forward with thwarting lack of reck.