Coats of arms, plaster Rorschach blots,
crowned stone moths, they encrust Europe.
As God was dismissed from churches
they f1 uttered in and cbng to the walls,
abstract comic-pages held by scrolled beasts,
or wear on the f1agstones underfoot.
They pertain to an earlier Antichrist,
the one before police. Mafiose ci tadels
made them, states of one attended family
islanded in furrows . The oldest
are the simplest. A cross, some coins,
a stri pe, a roof tree, a spur rowel,
bows taves, a hollow-gutted lion,
and all in lucid target colours.
Under tinned heads with reveries tied on,
shields are quartered and cubed by marriage
till they are sacred campaign maps
or anatomy inside dissected mantling,
glyphs minutely clear through their one
rule, that colour must abut either
gold or silver, the non-weapon metals.
The New World doesn't blazon well -
the new world ran away from blazonry
or was sent away in chains by it -
but exceptions shine: the spread eagle
with the fireworks display on its belly
and in the thinks-ballon above its head.
And when as a half-autistic
kid in scrub paddocks vert and or
I grooved on the cloisons of pedigree
it was a vivid writing of system
that hypnotised me, beyond the obvious
euphemism of force. It was eight hundred
years of cubist art and Europe's dreamings:
the Cup, the Rose, the Ship, the Antlers.
