War of the Beasts and the Animals

(as they must)

Night terrors

Marching their way –

Dragoons of them, tapping

Their beetle legs like twigs on dry paper.

The native population of the heart’s nether-nation

Their tears cocked like a loaded weapon

Like a lesson got by rote, your words of explanation.

Once they’re in, they devour everything.

And you, sweet reading

Lifting the lamp’s lit arms above its head

Spreading your tent above fallen dreamers

Hiding the Jew in an empty store cupboard.

And you, courage,

Fear’s flushed veneer.

The pointless ability to rest one’s cheeks in one’s hands

And lift one’s own head like a cup –

A cup

Barely half-filled

And quite useless:

The wine of madness, its dark contents

Spreading and taking hold in the animal body.

Oh how it foams,

Full of the dark fruits

Veiled over with a dull-blue film

Like the eye of a dying bird.

(He knows

Will he help?

Will he mix the wine with water?

Turn out the sleepless plasma screen?)

We deny, we turn away,

We walk the road step by step

Breathing with our eyes, hardly able to bear each other up,

We see acorns, fixed in the dirt clay:

Morning, morning is here!

How many of you there were, acorns.

The ones without caps,

The shaved heads of Cossacks

Burnt black in the sun,

Hardened, with long running scars.

And the ones like children, thick-walled,

Tiny barrels, big-headed boys,

So very sure of themselves

Born for the palm of the hand.

For the roll of the fist, for the life in a pocket

(A pitch dark, populous, perspiring pocket?)

In somebody’s possibly kindly grasp.

You aren’t for growing, for unfurling

You aren’t for rupturing the paper earth,

And humming from root to topmost leaf,

Like a hive interrupted.

Nor for the extending of a ship’s long deck

Or for the wearing of a feast on your back

Or for the lying as someone else’s bed.

You were meant for another purpose.

The squirrel busies itself, the wind passes through

Rat-a-tat!

One by one, two by two

All they know is how to fall on the road

Where they lie, as they must.