Two Princes, Four Kings

Two princes alight at point and thereupon take stand
Each speaks surely, their right self-evident to them:

I blue, thou gold; I too the right hand
Thou false I show; I the good best man

This discord breathes up within a dead beast’s eye, too
a willow tree; a sigh; the firstborn Emperor’s final cry:

Thou rust, I gold; thou too my beloved daughter’s sons
I sun, thou blood; thou each too hungry, one and one
Thou each a beaten drum that claws and bites the air
thou thrum! and thrum!

Drum home the willow’s frown
The birchbark and the sow
The wintersnow and the plow
Drum back the dead bull down

Drum back the rightful heir
The Emperor’s daughter comes from
the whitest snow and town
Drum back the dead bull down
in blood like fruit and fruit like mud
Drum back the dead bull down

To this pulse all four World Kings do alight
windblown, they arrive at this point of contentious fire
Too the wild devils and the false civilized liars arise
dressed in their brightest attire

They laugh; they sing; they drift in and land
to chew, to spit, and to decry
each to define the others’ lies
and to scream their holy bile

Here at the gory eye’s Orison, this place in lust does dwell
that desire to first place sounds:
four weeks; twelve months; all beneath the moons are dazed,
with ice-fire and the snowblind:
here they set the stage

We also alight, come to ourselves as unknowing Queens and Kings
Born here we return as twigs to lashings
do our dance across oceans
as our elders did in foregone, laughing days
and we do not recall, yet we remember
plagues and stones, ancient bones, that long hard month:
December

When one point draws two down, a blade and arrowbone
Four winds and World Kings have made this Orison fire their home
They speak! They speak! They say and groan!

An eye can be a prayer and
I am civilized; thou are beastly so
Thou are beastly eyed and lustful, lost
I shall come to know you thus
And from this we shall turn to blows

We watch, each unborn Queens and Kings,
blown here upon the wind
and in the ancient manner,
knowing not what it is we do and say,
we chant toward the prayerful pyre
We thrum toward the eye and bone:

Drum back the dead bull down
and thus we turn to blows