Eros in Aluminium
The small bugloss “grows upon the drie
ditch bankes about Pickadilla”.
The candied roots
“engender good blood”.
A pickadill in Blount’s
Glossography (1656),
a round hem,
a stiffened ornamental collar.
From two root words,
from pain and pleasure,
the body makes its language.
Animatronic joints
in the Circus “goin’ round an’ round”.
He is made of “a
metal, white,
sonorous, ductile, and malleable,
very light, not readily
oxidized or tarnished”,
who stirs the broth
with the point of an arrow
watching the ones become both,
turns it back
to make the boths into neithers.
With the dancing
wounded
lifts one foot
to kick away the ball of the world
on which the other stands.
Sweating the colours
of brands,
not a man,
nor is he numbered with the dead,
the filament
of all these lights
revolving his head.
Being desire,
has none.
Those streets down which I ran
through rain, naked
and hunted,
before, in assassin’s attire,
I gunned myself down,
are the streets over which you reign,
“dainty and
goodly”
dancer, anther at the centre of the rose,
the endless rose
of entertainments.
You did us, wicked
boy,
you done us in.
The three-cornered point
drives a hole that won’t close
from which the world
is peopled.
Where the bugloss
doesn’t grow,
no child of mine, no child,
you make the earth with child.
Are you blind?
Get out
the fucking way
!
Red dragon spews
a flood of brine
to swallow woman clothed with sun.
You gloss its trembling and roaring round,
“the voice of many waters’.
Not to be confused
with viper’s or with purple viper’s,
the small, the wild bugloss, Lycopsis arvensis,
the vision of the wolf among the fields.
John Gibbens
