You’ve put salt on my bread
and black sparks in my eye.
The hole in my side
is packed with God and devilry.
Your coiled hair gleams my death.
In bare Eden there springs up
a green snake with a red mouth.
It shoots from a rocky map.
If all were honey, this an album,
and toy poems were my pride
I’d not remember the ripped scream
and the reaped zone of the full bride.
As if one should write theology
and be dumb to heresies and the cross
or turn a blind and gentle eye
to the scorching apples in your dress.
Therefore from this old see-saw
let me jerk upward to my joy
according to the brutal law:
‘To every man his own boy.’
My eyes are heresies to the clear
and grave theology yours speak to me.
I make a Luther in your catholic air
though speechless sermons should have made me free.
God has the devil for shadow and I too
strike long diagonals at your angel’s step.
All my religion would awake to you
if you would shining grant me angel sleep.
The day’s in love with you as suns with gardens.
The dappled shade shakes thought across your brow.
If this is prison you spread out your pardons
for all dark sentences we suffer now.
You govern guilt by innocence, and dungeons
open like leaves to green and cool keys,
the twisted inmates straighten like a conscience
and by your glance all shufflers stand at ease.
And all the darkness gathers light about it
to hide its devilish shame as devils do.
If this is heresy can devils doubt it
who’ve made their best theology of you.
No mineral in your earth to tempt to stealing:
such tender shadows merely can provoke
the longing for a perfectness of feeling
we’ve almost spoken but we never spoke.
For only at rarest moments can we scent it
the garden we have lost but cannot find
and you the shining page that clearly meant it
already turn to print across the mind.
I know a young girl of great wit
who walks like Venus in her stylish gait
and some would say ‘Conceit’ but I would say:
‘A sun contents us if the clouds are grey,’
and also, ‘Have you seen between the stones
the water running as the water runs?’
All things that speak of surety and grace
proclaim us heretic from our proper place
though venomous devils preach against the light
which opens heavens at her precious feet.
Yet even these by sneers and laughs make known
the dear theology they now disown.