Two Poems

The Rebel Angels Under his tutelage we filtered out Took the oracle’s daring lifted brow To mean we would succeed Ten days, twelve months And doubled over where rags Required fickle stitching to unravel We lost our sleeves, shoulders Spread to cracking Hastened to control the turning valley Mud-wrung and wounded by our spears Being mixed of mind, informal now We fled to camp, Withdrew the infant wings Feather tumours still too raw, Too cruxed for flight We menaced, leaping here And there, as if to circumvent The sky’s guilty hoards: all bright Pushing us to march The stone revolted, Prayers took skids through our backs In Greek, Yiddish, Prussian … Signed away our wasted merger with the ground   Spit Fire Grill The hog’s snout is sovereign Saddled by instinct to the center of the flame While other scraps, salted by a paw Boil, are prepared to white, pink and harden Wiltshire smoked and granted a tract of land As wide as footprints brushed to form the pit Rushed to square away the scent of brine The rasping thrills of butter-crust And jealous embers, unattended What came next was whining My tongue burned oil for a spot of gravy Then hush was the snout, timed perfectly To grunt and comfort with familiar vowels It opened, licked the blackened wood And split the teeth to quiet