Clipped winged angels bow their heads in the garden
Sitting there decaying waiting for death
As railway drinkers sip at the tables
They sleep in communion like the argent and sable
With the railway sleepers and the drunk’s breath
Romano nosed bartenders serve out the beers
As from the same cup drink the true ones and pretenders
And radio silence cuts the rabbit’s ears
Across the noiseless countryside time is called
At closing time songs are sung through
And fly past towers of tenderness rhyme
That long ago a railway ran through here
When peat workers trudged their black shoes through snow
But all that’s left now for to show
Is the footprints of birds that dance on their toes
Yet when I have slept, like the railway sleepers
I am the rhine, the south drain, the rain
It is buried deep in a nerve bundle of the solar plexus consciousness
Calling me back there to live
At closing time
When the glasses clink
And the voices fall silent
Who will remember the dead angels in violet?
With their wings cut off as if from shame
Holding eternity in their palms
Old as the peat beneath them
Decaying so quietly without violence
Sometime close to dawn
When the midnight choir grows silent
And the rains pita- patter on the window
Then the shadow of a rush of thought
Has cascaded through consciousness
Like a waterfall of memory
So precious and startling as ice flow
So transmutable as vapours
Which flow around us
That the single state of being
Is as three, a trinity of Father, Son and Holy Spirit
Or ice, water and steam vapour
That before the dawn we are in phase all three
