The White Dog / Dust / Magnificat
Everywhere there is a white dog with blue eyes
& the deep cavernous red velvet of its placid mouth’s
interior a heart’s precursor
everywhere beneath the iron tracery of the lamp-
posts beneath the black candle
of the stone-pines from the dust of the earth I look
up the grass burns with a gesture I mean
its brightness is a Magnificat my soul doth magnify &c
blazing sincerely barely-cowled / veiled gloire
the clouds are sutures, veils.
ruptures
The Bears / The White Dog / Revelation
The great woods of the future running with bears, bears
with no voices, the ruin of cities, steel
girders, a shattered bell, the white dog with blue
eyes in the overgrowth; snow is falling
forever with its sparkling cold hands to bury
the Tower, to silence the parliaments,
the places of buying & selling, to bring the knees
of my heart to the earth & the sea that is
the lyric of the world – world that is everlasting
night because you are not in it.
I Am David / The Wind / A Plea
Remember a book that moved me so: I Am David.
The cover – a boy in a forest looking
back at me & beside him an Alsatian crouched
on the forest floor: they journey a good way together
until terribly the dog is shot & the boy
finds himself exquisitely alone. Wind sings in the wires.
Unnerving the way the scene wavers, goes
dark, something horrible engulfs the voice, high
& tearing – a kind of weak & reedy falsetto. Do not,
shepherd, lead us into a bleak night.
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Toby Martinez de las Rivas has published three collections with Faber & Faber: Terror (2014), Black Sun (2018) and Floodmeadow (2023). He received The Wiener Holocaust Library International Book Art Prize in 2014, The Andrew Waterhouse Award in 2008 and an Eric Gregory Award in 2005. He is the 2023/24 Blackburn Distinguished Artist in Residence at Duke University.
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