SUPERNATURAL SONGS
 I
 Ribb at the Tomb of Baile and Aillinn
 BECAUSE you have found me in the pitch-dark night
 With open book you ask me what I do.
 Mark and digest my tale, carry it afar
 To those that never saw this tonsured head
 Nor heard this voice that ninety years have cracked.
 Of Baile and Aillinn you need not speak,
 All know their tale, all know what leaf and twig,
 What juncture of the apple and the yew,
 Surmount their bones; but speak what none ha've
 heard.
 The miracle that gave them such a death
 Transfigured to pure substance what had once
 Been bone and sinew; when such bodies join
 There is no touching here, nor touching there,
 Nor straining joy, but whole is joined to whole;
 For the intercourse of angels is a light
 Where for its moment both seem lost, consumed.
 Here in the pitch-dark atmosphere above
 The trembling of the apple and the yew,
 Here on the anniversary of their death,
 The anniversary of their first embrace,
 Those lovers, purified by tragedy,
 Hurry into each other's arms; these eyes,
 By water, herb and solitary prayer
 Made aquiline, are open to that light.
 Though somewhat broken by the leaves, that light
 Lies in a circle on the grass; therein
 I turn the pages of my holy book.
 II
 Ribb denounces Patrick
 An abstract Greek absurdity has crazed the man –
 Recall that masculine Trinity.  Man, woman, child (a
 daughter or a son),
 That's how all natural or supernatural stories run.
 Natural and supernatural with the self-same ring are
 wed.
 As man, as beast, as an ephemeral fly begets, Godhead
 begets Godhead,
 For things below are copies, the Great Smaragdine
 Tablet said.
 Yet all must copy copies, all increase their kind;
 When the conflagration of their passion sinks, damped
 by the body or the mind,
 That juggling nature mounts, her coil in their em-
 braces twined.
 The mirror-scaled serpent is multiplicity,
 But all that run in couples, on earth, in flood or air,
 share God that is but three,
 And could beget or bear themselves could they but
 love as He.
 III
 Ribb in Ecstasy
 What matter that you understood no word!
 Doubtless I spoke or sang what I had heard
 In broken sentences.  My soul had found
 All happiness in its own cause or ground.
 Godhead on Godhead in sexual spasm begot
 Godhead.  Some shadow fell.  My soul forgot
 Those amorous cries that out of quiet come
 And must the common round of day resume.
 IV
 There
 There all the barrel-hoops are knit,
 There all the serpent-tails are bit,
 There all the gyres converge in one,
 There all the planets drop in the Sun.
 V
 Ribb considers Christian Love insufficient
 Why should I seek for love or study it?
 It is of God and passes human wit.
 I study hatred with great diligence,
 For that's a passion in my own control,
 A sort of besom that can clear the soul
 Of everything that is not mind or sense.
 Why do I hate man, woman Or event?
 That is a light my jealous soul has sent.
 From terror and deception freed it can
 Discover impurities, can show at last
 How soul may walk when all such things are past,
 How soul could walk before such things began.
 Then my delivered soul herself shall learn
 A darker knowledge and in hatred turn
 From every thought of God mankind has had.
 Thought is a garment and the soul's a bride
 That cannot in that trash and tinsel hide:
 Hatred of God may bring the soul to God.
 At stroke of midnight soul cannot endure
 A bodily or mental furniture.
 What can she take until her Master give!
 Where can she look until He make the show!
 What can she know until He bid her know!
 How can she live till in her blood He live!
 VI
 He and She
 As the moon sidles up
 Must she sidle up,
 As trips the scared moon
 Away must she trip:
 "His light had struck me blind
 Dared I stop'.
 She sings as the moon sings:
 "I am I, am I;
 The greater grows my light
 The further that I fly'.
 All creation shivers
 With that sweet cry
 VII
 What Magic Drum?
 He holds him from desire, all but stops his breathing
 lest
 primordial Motherhood forsake his limbs, the child no
 longer rest,
 Drinking joy as it were milk upon his breast.
 Through light-obliterating garden foliage what magic
 drum?
 Down limb and breast or down that glimmering belly
 move his mouth and sinewy tongue.
 What from the forest came? What beast has licked its
 young?
 VIII
 Whence had they come?
 Eternity is passion, girl or boy
 Cry at the onset of their sexual joy
 "For ever and for ever'; then awake
 Ignorant what Dramatis personae spake;
 A passion-driven exultant man sings out
 Sentences that he has never thought;
 The Flagellant lashes those submissive loins
 Ignorant what that dramatist enjoins,
 What master made the lash.  Whence had they come,
 The hand and lash that beat down frigid Rome?
 What sacred drama through her body heaved
 When world-transforming Charlemagne was con-
 ceived?
 IX
 The Four Ages of Man
 He with body waged a fight,
 But body won; it walks upright.
 Then he struggled with the heart;
 Innocence and peace depart.
 Then he struggled with the mind;
 His proud heart he left behind.
 Now his wars on God begin;
 At stroke of midnight God shall win.
 X
 Conjunctions
 If Jupiter and Saturn meet,
 What a cop of mummy wheat!
 The sword's a cross; thereon He died:
 On breast of Mars the goddess sighed.
 XI
 A Needle's Eye
 All the stream that's roaring by
 Came out of a needle's eye;
 Things unborn, things that are gone,
 From needle's eye still goad it on.
 XII
 Meru
 Civilisation is hooped together, brought
 Under a mle, under the semblance of peace
 By manifold illusion; but man's life is thought,
 And he, despite his terror, cannot cease
 Ravening through century after century,
 Ravening, raging, and uprooting that he may come
 Into the desolation of reality:
 Egypt and Greece, good-bye, and good-bye, Rome!
 Hermits upon Mount Meru or Everest,
 Caverned in night under the drifted snow,
 Or where that snow and winter's dreadful blast
 Beat down upon their naked bodies, know
 That day brings round the night, that before dawn
 His glory and his monuments are gone.