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ARTS AND CULTURE

Three icon poems

  • 29 May 2006
The Old Testament Trinity Icon (With Sara and Abraham) Beget the begetter, to beget your will as cherished angelic frames solid as age to beget for, beget in thrust of joy, beget against negators, to beget in yellow fields of begotten light begat and kitted out with wings of begetting, as lush as tree, temple, or cliffs begotten as window to heaven as portal through to hollows of body and robes and halo molten over surfaces begat out of three lines of thought, triangles dressed as circles begetting the beatific spread of communion and offspring. Transfiguration Icon Occasionally, the mountain glows at the summit an event horizon, its outcropping and granite folds irregular branchlines of flooded gum, or more sparsely, shocked white wandoos, tabernacles, conductors for dark clouds and all the light buried within them; climbers - lawmakers, rangers, naturalists - converse, side-lit. Icon of Saint Francis Inside the animal soul, soul of animal in the round, rounded out, encircled, the one crucifix of one blessed heart, not the blessed eye of the hunter - crosshairs - not the blessed circling of the aerial spray plane - drop zone, fly-past - not the eyelet through which the trap-chain - its underpinning - is threaded, nor the trigger-plate angled and set, the sharp teeth of the ribcage clasping portal, porthole through to the creator, falling from Golgotha, suspended in the heart, the soul, the skull, malarial hallucination seeping through the heart wound, bitter-sweet, charismatic penitent, witness the pact made with the fox, feral in the realm of marsupials and chickens, not upheld, shot and poisoned on the outskirts of town, beneath the invisible curvature of night, the place where the pact was made, by others broken.
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