Glossing The Spoils

FOUR CORNERS

I am honored in praise.

Song is heard

in the Four-Cornered Fortress,

four its revolutions.

Preiddeu Annwn

Held with poets and plunderers

in this sea-surrounded keep,

I wander its deep halls, dirt floors

strewn with rushes and the herbs of the world,

under which are grease, bones, spittle.

In a niche nested in a wall, the glazed

leaves of a parchment buckle slightly,

as if come alive, to reveal

the raised letters of a phrase:

I am honored in praise,

a phrase burnished in heavenly gold

that overwrites some faded heresy

inked in cinnabar and cochineal;

the dried blood of an old grammar,

navigation or lament, injured

by a scraping hand. Deeper, more covered

are faces, grey, overgrown with lichens,

voices that can wake the hills,

cries, sounding birdlike, burred.

Song is heard, 

sneaking up from ruination,

where she has crouched for so long;

little, wan woman, ringlets of hair,

fall like flax to her calloused heels.

As noon and jet mingle, her lath

body seems cut from a coppice.

She stretches a crooked palm, arm,

genius loci, making new growth

break through the stones of this fastness,

in the Four-Cornered Fortress.

In an underground cell, a solitary

staff planted in the beaten earth

blossoms into a single stemmed tree;

she hums, bathing my spiraling ears

with tiny, rapid waves,

until the walls of this angular prison

open and, from all directions, bees or spirits

swarm my heart like a storied hive.

Amber tears flood its chambers. I listen, 

four its revolutions.