heroic
remember the red sun rising
in the full drawn dawn of your labour
when the shadow of love cast its purple measure
long across the hills and pasture
with its raucous callous divine voice calling all crows
whose circling driving eyes scour the plains and open places
and drift quietly through the dark hid woods
search on dark communion
reach on heroic love
and in your talismanic grip an Odyssey
an old stranger dressed in outlandish garb
black and shiny adorned with feather and silver
mysterious and odd against your eyes
will approach and though apprehension grips you
like a tight throat the stranger asks only direction
glad at your easy reply you relax into that company
whence almost unnoticed in your carelessness
the stranger thanks you with a grip as light as elation
peculiar upon the wrist
that stranger the old crow woman
was that shadow and agent of love
and the pressure upon your taut forearm
the mystic ordination
by which the doctrine of love
was pressed into your ready veins
and so the prophesy of the Odyssey is begun
it courses silently into the body
into the soul
into desire and into this world is it flung
and on the other side it is repeated
for this love must have its lover
so where will this loves requite be found
will it be a place
will it be a trivial artifact
or as simple as an attribute
will it be in human form
or as enveloping as the blood of nations
a luckless love that draws condemnation
down the many dawns across the many hills and pastures
and slowly over the many bones and scarabs
that ate their carcass
and plays a sad lament in words
and the glory of art
perhaps as only love can do