for the voice of the god,
and he came to me quietly,
a shimmer of smoke
at the edge of imagined country,
where the whispered truth rises,
and the words that you dream
are here and suddenly elsewhere.
It is the old voice
felt on the back of the neck,
the thing under reason and thought,
when out of the smoke of your dreaming,
out of the harbor of blood,
out of the ninth moon’s drowning,
the dead rise are rising
have risen and speak
in the language of sparrow and drum.
And oh may the gods
believe in my telling,
in the dream I recount,
and may the long dead listen
in the wind-drowned lands
in the dust’s generation
as I tell you the seventh
of seven visions,
the song of the dragon’s wing.
III
First there was eye,
then night, then immutable north,
then the smell of the springbok
over the launched horizon,
and then I was walking,
over a dying plain
littered with rock
and immaculate bone.
Ahead in a cavern
of dazzled sunlight,
on the sunstruck and burnished
edge of the world,
the dragons, dark jewels,
a flicker of ebony wings,
a frenzy of beetles
feasting on carrion,
and I cannot tell you
in memory’s dream,
whether the sight
or the seeing drew me
whether I went
of my own accord
or drawn like a jessed bird
hard to the falconer’s will.
But what did it matter
when the dark thing ascended
in an old smell of blood,
of creosote and coal?
I looked to the sun
and I saw them in legion
wingtip to wingtip
in the western skies
and it was for this
I was brought to the summit,
it was for this
that I dreamed the philosopher’s dream.
Sunlight under my riding
and an alien heartbeat,
the cold pulse of blood
like the waters’ convergence-
on the back of the monster
the sunlight was dreaming to shadows
as the wings passed over
the dying world.
And out of the lifting heartbeat,
out of the drum and shadow,
a voice rose around me,
inveigling, caressing,
a voice indistinct
from my own in my dreams,
a voice indistinct
from the chambered shadows,
from a century’s nursing
of venom and fire,
and all of my dreaming
had brought me to this,
had prepared me to ride
on the wings of the darkness,
and the voice of the serpent
I heard in the air
as she spoke to me
saying … saying …
IV
Do not believe
this is only beginning,
Oh do not believe
of my dark and interminable legions,
that as long as the heart
is a thicket of knives,
we will not prevail
regardless of knights
and their rumored lances.
I am telling you this
from the heart of the storm,
from the tumult of wings
at the edge of your vision.
Over the miles
of a dozen kingdoms
I hasten toward Huma
toward his forged
and impossible lance,
toward victory, though
the hot abysm of dreams
swells with a voice
that is telling me always
it will end in this age,
in expected convergence
of dragon and darkness,
of the plain appointed
and the point of the lance.
Oh do not expect
there is ever an ending,
for even the sunlight
that closes around me
masks a nation of shadows,
the sigh of the desert
drowns out the wails
of the buried and beaten,
and do not believe
this is changing,
that the endings are happy,
that the cycle of seasons
awaits an eventual spring,
that the sunrise riding
the wake of the darkness
is more than a mutual dream.
Oh do not believe
as I ride into battle,
that the battle is more
than an accident, formed
in the clumsy collision
of sunlight and shadow,
that a morning will pass
in an unending sunlight
without the dark brush of a wing.
V
And as I arose on the Lady’s back,
the wake of her wingbeats
blossomed in darkness,
darkness surrounded me,
darkness expanding
and harvesting light,
and around us a tumult of wings
settled like ashes
in a winter of loss.
So circled the Lady
over plain over sunlight
toward the knight and the lance,