注：
1) 原文house也可能指黄道十二宫之一。
2) 原文furies也可能指古希腊罗马神话中的复仇女神。
3) 亚巴顿指圣经《启示录》中掌管无底坑的天使。
4) 托马斯出版过名为《小狗艺术家的画像》的小说集。
5) 原文atlas亦可指男像柱。
6) 托马斯少年时曾在《威尔士日报》做过一年多的记者。
7) 曼德拉草的根茎形似人体，传说当曼德拉草被连根拔起时，会听到它的尖叫声。
8) 原文也有吹嘘的意思。
9) 摩羯宫（位处南半球）出生的人也叫Goat（山羊），隐含色鬼的意思。巨蟹宫（位处北半球）的原文Cancer则隐含癌症的意思。
10) 传说塘鹅会在缺乏食物的时候以胸口的血哺育幼鸟，因此基督教中塘鹅可作为耶稣受难的象征。
11) 雅各(Jacob)梦见天梯的故事见《创世纪28:10-17》
12) 瑞普•凡•温克尔是美国作家华盛顿•欧文一篇小说中的主人公。
13) 对跖地区指地球上处于正相对位置的地区（譬如分处于南北半球的地区）。
14) 原文poker还有扑克牌的意思。
15) 《马太福音19:24》写道：
我再告诉你们，骆驼穿过针眼，比有钱人进天国还要容易。
16) 圣经中的天使长，曾向圣母报告她会怀上圣子耶稣。
17) 以实玛利可指亚伯拉罕的长子，也可能指梅尔维尔《白鲸》中的叙述者，也常指被社会抛弃的人。
18) 约拿是《圣经•旧约》中的先知，曾被一条类似鲸的大鱼吞噬，三天后又被完好无损地吐出。
19) 即莫比•迪克，《白鲸》中那条白色抹香鲸的名字。
20) 原文medusa也可指美杜莎，希腊神话中的怪物，以毒蛇为头发，看到她眼睛的人会变成石头。
21) 希腊神话中的女海妖，常用她们美妙的歌声诱惑船员，从而使船只在岛屿周围触礁沉没。
22) 原文joker亦可指爱开玩笑的人。
23) 即耶稣教给门徒的祈祷词。
24) 约翰福音19:29-30：
有个盛满了酸酒的器皿放在那里：他们拿海绵蘸满了酸酒，放在牛膝草上，送到他嘴边。耶稣于是受了酸酒，说道，成了：他垂下头来，将灵交付。
25) 可能指各各他（骷髅岗）的十字架。
26) 指作为普通人的基督。
27) 可能指三原色。
28) 马太福音19:14：
耶稣却说，“要容许小孩子到我这里来，不要禁止他们；因为天国就属于这样的人。”
29) 制作木乃伊用的一种矿物。
30) 一种从散沫花叶提炼出来的棕红色染剂，可用于染发或染指甲。
31) 古埃及统治者的冠冕上常饰有神蛇。
32) 原文ash还有灰烬的意思。
33) 古埃及人相信死者见到冥王之前要渡过一条河。
34) 早期受迫害的基督徒曾用鱼作为他们的标记。
35) 形容创世初期的伊甸园。
This Bread I Break
This bread I break was once the oat,
This wine upon a foreign tree
Plunged in its fruit;
Man in the day or wine at night
Laid the crops low, broke the grape's joy.
Once in this wind the summer blood
Knocked in the flesh that decked the vine,
Once in this bread
The oat was merry in the wind;
Man broke the sun, pulled the wind down.
This flesh you break, this blood you let
Make desolation in the vein,
Were oat and grape
Born of the sensual root and sap;
My wine you drink, my bread you snap.
Altarwise by Owl-light
I
Altarwise by owl-light in the halfway house
The gentleman lay graveward with his furies;
Abaddon in the hangnail cracked from Adam
And, from his fork, a dog among the faries,
The atlas-eater with a jaw for news,
Bit out the mandrake with to-morrow’s scream.
Then, penny-eyed, that gentleman of wounds,
Old cock from nowheres and the heaven’s egg,
With bones unbuttoned to the half-way winds,
Hatched from the windy salvage on one leg,
Scraped at my cradle in a walking word
That night of time under the Christward shelter:
I am the long world’s gentleman, he said,
And share my bed with Capricorn and Cancer.
II
Death is all metaphors, shape in one history;
The child that sucketh long is shooting up,
The planet-ducted pelican of circles
Weans on an artery the gender’s strip;
Child of the short spark in a shapeless country
Soon sets alight a long stick from the cradle;
The horizontal cross-bones of Abaddon,
You by the cavern over the black stairs,
Rung bone and blade, the verticals of Adam,
And, manned by midnight, Jacob to the stars.
Hairs of your head, then said the hollow agent,
Are but the roots of the nettles and of feathers
Over these groundworks, thrusting through a pavement
And hemlock-headed in the wood of weathers.
III
First there was the lamb on knocking knees
And three dead seasons on a climbing grave
That Adam’s wether in the flock of horns,
Butt of the tree-tailed worm that mounted Eve,
Horned down with skullfoot and the skull of toes
On thunderous pavements in the garden time;
Rip of the vaults, I took my marrow-ladle
Out of the wrinkled undertaker’s van,
And Rip Van Winkle from a timeless cradle,
Dipped me breast-deep in the descended bone;
The black ram, shuffling of the year, old winter,
Alone alive among his mutton fold,
We rung our weathering changes on the ladder,
Said the antipodes, and twice spring chimed.
IV
What is the metre of the dictionary?
The size of genesis? the short spark’s gender?
Shade without shape? the shape of Pharaoh’s echo?
(My shape of age nagging the wounded whisper).
Which sixth of wind blew out the burning gentry?
(Questions are hunchbacks to the poker marrow).
What of a bamboo man among your acres?
Corset the boneyards for a crooked boy?
Button your bodice on a hump of splinters,
My camel’s eyes will needle through the shroud.
Love’s reflection of the mushroom features,
Stills snapped by night in the bread-sided field,
Once close-up smiling in the wall of pictures,
Arc-lamped thrown back upon the cutting flood.
V
And from the windy West came two-gunned Gabriel,
From Jesu’s sleeve trumped up the king of spots,
The sheath-decked jacks, queen with a shuffled heart;
Said the fake gentleman in suit of spades,
Black-tongued and tipsy from salvation’s bottle.
Rose my Byzantine Adam in the night.
For loss of blood I fell on Ishmael’s plain,
Under the milky mushrooms slew my hunger,
A climbing sea of Asia had me down
And Jonah’s Moby snatched me by the hair,
Cross-stroked salt Adam to the frozen angel
Pin-legged on pole-hills with a black medusa
By waste seas where the white bear quoted Virgil
And sirens singing from our Lady’s sea-straw.
VI
Cartoon of slashes on the tide-traced crater,
He in a book of water tallow-eyed
By lava’s light split through the oyster vowels
And burned sea-silence on a wick of words.
Pluck, cock, my sea eye, said medusa’s scripture,
Lop, love, my fork tongue, said the pin-hilled nettle;
And love plucked out the stinging siren’s eye,
Old cock from nowheres lopped the minstrel tongue
Till tallow I blew from the wax’s tower
The fats of midnight when the salt was singing;
Adam, time’s joker, on a witch of cardboard
Spelt out the seven seas, an evil index,
The bagpipe-breasted ladies in the deadweed
Blew out the blood gauze through the wound of manwax.
VII
Now stamp the lord’s prayer on a grain of rice,
The bible-leaved of all the written woods
Strip to this tree: a rocking alphabet,
Genesis in the root, the scarecrow word,
And one light’s language in the book of trees;
Doom on deniers at the wind turned statement.
Time’s tune my ladies with the teats of music,
The scaled sea-sawers, fix in a naked sponge
Who sucks the bell-voiced Adam out of magic,
Time, milk, and magic, from the world beginning.
Time is the tune my ladies lend their heartbreak,
From bald pavilions and the house of bread
Time tracks the sound of shape on man and cloud,
On rose and icicle, the ringing handprint.
VIII
This was the crucifixion on the mountain,
Time’s nerve in vinegar, the gallow grave
As tarred with blood as the bright thorns I wept;
The world’s my wound, God’s Mary in her grief,
Bent like three trees and bird-papped through her shift,
With pins for teardrops is the long wound’s woman.
This was the sky, Jack Christ, each minstrel angle
Drove in the heaven-driven of the nails
Till the three-colored rainbow from my nipples
From pole to pole leapt round the snail-waked world.
I by the tree of thieves, all glory’s sawbones,
Unsex the skeleton this mountain minute,
And by this blowclock witness of the sun
Suffer the heaven’s children through my heartbeat.
IX
From the oracular archives and parchment,
Prophets and fibre kings in oil and letter,
The lamped calligrapher, the queen and splints,
Buckle to lint and cloth their natron footsteps,
Draw on the glove of prints, dead Cairo’s henna
Pour like a halo on the caps and serpents.
This was the resurrection in the desert,
Death from a bandage, rants the mask of scholars
Gold on such features, and the linen spirit
Weds my long gentlemen to dusts and furies
With priest and pharaoh bed my gentle wound,
World in the sand on the triangular landscape,
With stones of odyssey for ash and garland
And rivers of the dead around my neck.
X
Let the tale’s sailor from a Christian voyage
Atlaswise hold half-way off the dummy bay
Time’s ship-racked gospel on the globe I balance:
So shall winged harbours through the rockbirds’ eyes
Spot the blown word, and on the seas I image
December’s thorn screwed in a brow of holly.
Let the first Peter from a rainbow’s quayrail
Ask the tall fish swept from the bible east,
What rhubarb man peeled in her foam-blue channel
Has sown a flying garden round that sea-ghost?
Green as beginning, let the garden diving
Soar, with its two bark towers, to that Day
When the worm builds with the gold straws of venom
My nest of mercies in the rude, red tree.
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