Magnetic Sword

by Paul Holman

1

There have been passages of my life in which every meeting drew me on to love, every occurrence was given as a sign: my feet neither bound nor free.

2

Shadow of a cloud I
could not identify, companion
to the unrecognised face
of this girl who walked
with her arms held
open between mysterious
hedges and out into the road
spanned by that bridge
I would not pass
beneath, its curve made
hideous by a qliphotic stain.

3

Her stomach crammed with nettles, she drew a picture in which various kinds of thoughts left her head in the form of birds, clouds or stars. She met with some of them again later, snagged upon the branches of trees in the grove she entered in the course of her tunnel work.

4

He would always pause to write there, resting his notebook on top of the pillarbox, or, if the postman shooed him off, upon the saddle of one of the bicycles chained to the fence outside the gallery, hitching up his trousers with his left hand before moving on: but I hold that each dreamed text is a terma in the mind, treasure best left to be forgotten and then discovered anew.

5

the erased the
most terrible fable
continued to haunt
us too much
paracetamol in the
bathroom just before
we met three
lights in a
bowl each grey
green iris opaque
brought up in
the radiant house
of a claustrophobiac

6

My eyes adjusted to view the lake as a cauldron from which mist peeled: two beaked men raised a severed head between them; their hands looked elegant but each stick leg terminated in claws. The rune described by this stooping figure on a spit of rock (both hands and the head imprisoned) had been chalked upon the gate of the wood in which I found a five pointed stone, a hole through its centre.

7

The two old men who collected aluminium went past: they both wore anoraks without regard for the weather, and little knitted skullcaps; each pushed a trolley loaded with crumpled cans. Largely benevolent, they gathered the empties which street drinkers had discarded around park benches and in bus shelters, but used claws on sticks to raid the recycling banks as well.

8

During the time I spent among them, I learned that their music represented a settlement bordered by woods, defined by broad avenues and uninhabitable structures of forgotten use, cloven by a river that once in a while bore traces of a way of existence which they could no longer interpret. Each night’s performance described a variant route, direct or meandering, through this site occupied by the collective mind: although the musicians touched upon the same points over and over again, they never followed the same sequence or proceeded in quite the same manner.

9

I wished only to be possessed by her: but my thought settled upon the cafe in which I swore at her and walked away, the clothes stall where I encountered her in the company of a friend and she greeted me with such tenderness. I found that I too had developed the soft glance of a drinker: how could I venture into the tunnels with such defenceless eyes?
 
10

the word
kobold
 
I could
not keep
out of
 
my head
the first
time I
 
met him

11

The glimpsed half face of this king, blue skinned, turned aside because of a magical commitment forgotten so rapidly, treated with such casual interest: but I knew myself subject to that goddess who took leave of her sisters in the charnel ground to walk upon a white downland path.

12

I have written things as they appear, but I no longer set them down in the twilight language in which they come to me, having lost hope in a conspiracy of understanding which merely fed a critical elite: world formed of speech, world formed of thought, world formed of dreams.

13

Each name a ghost
we raise: its roadside
legend marks the edge
of hell, as plough
enclosed a diurnal city.

We find the common
shape of flower, star,
Medusa’s head; the last
tool used to cut
the tomb, itself sacred.

14

There have been passages of my life in which every meeting drew me on to love, every occurrence was given as a sign: I let the green horse guide me into the river meadows, under the bridge obscured by a cloud of steam from the brewery, and so at last into the tunnel.