On Advent’s Eve
By Ed Bayliss
Time enough has passed,
For my eyes and ears to cool,
For my willing hands to pick a pen
Whose nib begins to drool.
Here, at Advent’s eve, I’ll write
As moon’s relief comes fast,
As sky’s now purple underbelly
Purges itself at last.
Picture this, a man and maid
Who bears an unborn child,
Her arms, ribbons which wrap around
The bent-backed infant mild.
Her small one seems just the same,
Shovelled into time’s wide span,
Into small rooms with strange people,
No architect has drawn this plan.
The man wraps his lips round a hunk of bread
Held in cement solid hands,
His ears tangled in knots of brass,
Deaf to the grind of shifting sands.
His words begin as a lump in the throat,
Unstuck by wine alone
As he drinks deep to charge his throat
Which speaks things cold as stone.
Alas, his thoughts have leapt into
The flaming crucible of doubt,
No child of his, he knew slept in
His maid’s soft curving pouch.
Her soul is thin as a sheepskin drum,
Has been played to a sickly tune,
Which has jarred against nature’s chime
Like snowfall blanketing June.
An odour of corruption
Creeps through his nostrils flared
And shallow lakes of steam pool
Round his crazed eyes made unpaired.
Now all he sees of his maid is this:
Gross breasts juggling across a chest
And off her bare sloped shoulder
Trickle all offices of love’s test.
The maid all full and swelling,
Too full, too full, he thinks,
In her, some big block building
Writ large in thick black ink,
He’ll arrive soon now from slumber,
And arise in time to come,
Time wakes with him in a damp green churchyard
Like milk teeth from a new-born’s gum.
Still, the man wears no face,
Only sadness is upon him,
The monkey on his back laughs loud,
And beats his red ribbed skin.
He handles her hair but feels only straw
Sprouting from an eggshell head,
Her skin’s a tundra wasteland
And her words are thin as thread.
She speaks in brush strokes,
Of high him and seeds forever,
Even three in ones
And much about whatevers.
Where he talks brass sheets,
Bent around the baby’s base,
In a world, a peopled desert,
Where women once were chaste.
But while most of us sleep deep
Behind eyelids and wrinkled sheets,
He lies before something else,
A place of mansion filled streets.
The truth is that within this street,
High up above earth’s edge,
The man, he hears a voice slip
From a whitewashed window ledge.
It says: Have you seen her?
The maid with painted lips,
The one you ‘see’ through rippled water
With her hands cupped to her hips.
For good and right stand on her side,
Her child’s life is drawn and planned,
His words will scrape many men’s ear.
A king’s lot: to do good and be damned.
He wakes with awe sponsored eyebrows,
And washes the night from his face.
A leafless tree watches on, expecting,
Glimpsing all of man’s race
Below breathless skies, as though
Speaking song or singing speech.
Not until the tree has gone,
Will we of its ways teach.
A shivering horse’s steaming breath
Columns towards the sun,
It’s blinkers hang on fenceposts
Far beyond the reach of anyone.
I see. He sees –
