Lilith rises from her bed of night
Remote Azrael, absolute, implacable,
Listen, she says, to the unhinged rhythm, together
Lame Lilith lost, her eyes
She flutters helplessly round him, a moth
Azrael knows. All that turns returns
When it suits him, Azrael takes form
She is in pain, luckless Lilith, unpinioned
She is a scene stealer, an involuntary shape shifter, Aug 14Scenes From A Mythic Marriage
(Here Comes Everyman)
I
thinly she cries O Azrael,
the unflinching stars dance
as we dance, and where
galaxies implode again, there
we will not be parted
They dance a wigged and powdered minuet
she turns in a rustle of crinoline,
and a mirrorball turns above
spinning out orbits of stars
and Lilith gyrates, then her left arm
swings back, above and centres,
3 fingers joined in the sign of Aum,
tum her right foot slaps the ground
in the timeless sway of the dance to Shiva.
Azrael moves as slowly as the stars.
II
arriving from another distance, watches
as Lilith comes up gasping for air
watches the waves toy with her hair,
She is mobbed about by turning tides
round, round as any ocean
III
we are the ocean, I the ebb
and you the flow, that pulses under
every surface – she is mistaken
where the dragback of the tides pulls shingle from the shore
there Azrael is, and she, she is beached and tugged,
unable to hold those stones: another clod to the main,
and her continent is the less
Azrael has the last laugh, stones rolling
on the bed of his ocean
IV
as hollow as memory, empty as dream
that sunken gaze harvests doubt
and drapes it with cobwebs – this is her gift
to her lover. She will bind her own eyes
(‘we are haunted by daylight’ she says)
and her lips will recoil from the commonplace
At times like these Azrael loves
his image in her
V
to his dark flame, drawn in
by the wavelengths of polarized light
To the moth’s eyes he is a compound
composed of multitudes
like many-headed Vishvarupa
or Picasso’s vision of Vollard
VI
Those multiple fractions
reflect connect and cohere.
Lilith, poor Lilith is not what she seems
living on the edge
of her centrifugal galaxy
slipping from world to world
unable to enter the stable centre.
She implores; Azrael compels
VII
out of the shadows that loom at his back
like monstrous wings
and he waits, insatiable
time is his own, and depth
he knows no need
Both know, he will accept
Lilith’s musty embrace, and leave
VIII
and Azrael can absolve her of it
but his price is to take all she has
and what else truly hers does she have?
a lank lost grace, a terrible gaunt beauty
she has a feral animality
that preys on itself
IX
Lilith the imperious, the beguiling, the haunted
lone Lilith aghast, forever outcast, forever
frightened of frontiers, lost in metaphor,
chiming with the wind and waves
Brave Lilith, unarmed and alone
on fierce night seas under orbiting stars