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the dark is gone.

      There. See?

      Think when it began, when you

      could not be sure whether

      light had begun or your dream continued.

      The benign infection advanced cell by cell

      into the body of night, till you could not tell

      if you could see

      or you could not see.

      But you could.

      The infarction of love.

      Poor dark night. It happens every time.

      Mixed message

      Half past dawn for us mixed mortals

      and the frozen birch tree is doing as good a job

      of feeding the grosbeaks as the frozen apple tree.

      When they swirl away from their délices de sorbet aux pommes

      (McSorbet) in the winter sun

      they head for the top of the birch and snack on its catkins.

      Of the five, two

      have red breasts, sharply V-shaped sharp red and

      they are pecking themselves, those two,

      strenuously pecking their breasts…

      can this really be grooming?

      Isn’t that blood they’re feeding on? ’Struth!

      I know it’s cold out, but.

      Ah, they fly away, with the others,

      as living as ever.

      Flip the pages. The rose-breasted grosbeak… sure enough

      a V like a dagger in the chest.

      Have you heard the one about the pelican?

      Mother pelican performs own breast surgery, beak like a dagger,

      feeds its young

      with gobs of its own blood.

      Have you heard the one about the pelican chick?

      An insurance chick gets laid, one egg alongside the favoured egg

      and when the favoured egg hatches and thrives

      the ‘insurance chick’ gets pushed out of the nest.

      That’s it for the chick.

      For this it came.

      So which is for real?

      Both are. Different iconographies.

      In the Other Book it’s the iconography of fittedness —

      multiple wasted experiments of how to get along in this world.

      A zero sum game,

      it worked for pelicans.

      Pelican so loved the world

      that she gave her other begotten one, to the end.

      Now all that believe in Pelican

      shall not see ‘Pelican’ perish but have persistent life.

      In the book that’s called The Book, it’s science lesson 101

      before the burning bush : ‘Turn aside.’

      See why the branches are not consumed.

      ‘Wisdom :

      attend!’

      Asidedness.

      The grosbeak as burning bush

      step one on the marathon of self-offering

      that burns and burns and is not consumed.

      The iconography of cathedral glass, bronze, stone,

      Latin’s Pie Pelicane, the ancient christic image.

      And we : in the image, we say. Pelicans unlimited.

      ‘We offer and present unto thee… ourselves, our souls and bodies,

      to be a reasonable, holy, and living sacrifice…’

      (Cranmer’s 16th century take on Paul of the Book).

      You mean really? You mean do?

      As a race, we have a pretty clear notion of where

      one skin stops and another begins. We’re good at boundaries.

      We could push the chick from the nest — we’re

      the favoured chick.

      My pain is not yours, and vice versa.

      At least we live as if that’s what we thought.

      But the pelican of Christology and legend, that’s

      a horse of another feather.

      Someone called it

      ‘absolute donation’.

      What if

      drawing your own blood to feed others

      blood donorship in clinical quiverfuls of mystic syringes

      what if sheer cliff-edge generosity

      absolute donation

      were the bull’s-eye of every post-communion prayer? For real?

      I think we might lose our sense of skin, of whose pain is whose,

      of where

      the edge of the nest is.

      That would be novel.

      We might feel the pain of the Congo.

      Or would that be asking

      more than we’re up for?

      Riverbreath

      Before there’s light, there’s a wall of black halfway up the sky

      glooming as if a distant storm-cloud

      had rolled in

      or been rolled out

      then lodged

      on top of the far shore.

      Or had it made it that far? Or both far and away beyond?

      Who was to know.

      There was no light to see by

      just black on black.

      Would something crash soon, something break or burst —

      down or forth or out?

      Who knew.

      Sleep rolled around.

      Closer to dawn, a windowful of blank, etched on by naked trees :

      dance still as still life, nature morte. The blank : full

      so full the foghorns must sound,

      the coast guard and freighter invisible in the breath of the river.

      The riverbreath had begun to precipitate out at first on the

      topmost branches

      the fingers in this still dance

      fitting the tips before lightfall with gloves as light as breath

      divinable if doubtable;

      but now

      while the sun’s own foghorn ooooo’d its retinal signal of potential

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