AUGURAL AUSPICES

by Michael Boughn

“We are lived by powers we pretend to understand.” —W. H. Auden

“To be quite honest, it’s just a fucking brownie.”
—Chef Kwame Onwuachi commenting on The Cosmic Brownie

Birds scatter into the poem every
which way, swallows, wrens, vultures, and geese,
eagles of course, etch indecipherable
prophecies on the sun’s face
as raven’s stark slash
interrupts the sun, speaks of god
knows what, fire perhaps
quickly erasing whatever settled illusion
of happy mastery in the roar
of our own vast indifference to light
stone, water, earth, scent of smoke
the news, travels fast littered with Hittite
names for house and tenebrous allusions
haunt chiaroscuro implicated
announcement of earthquake, plague,
tempest, corruption, war and collapse,
a veritable catastrophic kit
and caboodle, ultimate doom prophecy

undone by the children’s laughter
down the beach on the verge of the Bay

Yeah, but what
do kids know about the Council of Trent
and inquisitory constrictions condemned
art’s knowledge of humandivine 
matter-of-fact-god-joy’s last

supper’s good food and good
company, one eye on Gethsemane,
the other on the wine to a feast in Levi’s
house (landed Veronese on the Hot
Seat, too much imagination
for the Bishop) opens a geography of world
secretes its own light, earth of emerald
cities, geosophical co-ordinates entwined
cross-roads’ limbs heave with joint passion,
a word emerges from suffer to point
to mind of uncertain compass in heat
of caring’s embrace of matter of fact

That old butterfly flap to tornado yarn
haunts current street’s dawn peach glow,
so still, waiting for the wave to hit, far away
joyboys disconsenting the liberal consensus
activates lower regions of imagination’s
infernal geography disgorge gangs
of pain monkeys, impish creatures pour
from Moloch’s arse to inflict
maximum suffering on the poor
suckers who empowered them in the first
place and turn the joint over to
The Lordly Ones™
who aim to reconstitute the Constitution
in the name of Divine Right of the Strongest
to kick the living shit out of everyone else
and make them thank God for it