The poem presents itself as a testament delivered from the edge of exhaustion, yet what gives it peculiar force is not simply its mythic density but the way it strains the modal conditions under which a speaker can exist at all. From its first gesture, the claim that “I did not have anything left to say,” it frames utterance as something that could have been otherwise. To say one has nothing left to say is already to negate a space of possibilities that once seemed open. The voice has traversed its alternatives and now stands among their remnants. This gives the entire sequence a pressure that is not merely psychological but modal, as if the speaker is aware of the structure of what might have been, what must have been, and what cannot now be.

The opening declaration that “All but one / of my prophecies had been written / down” situates the speaker within a field of dependence. Prophecies, once spoken, become inscriptions, and inscriptions persist independently of the speaker’s continuing vitality. Yet they are not free-standing in the sense of being self-grounding. They depend upon the prophetic act, and that act depends upon a speaker who claims timidity in the face of horror. The “betrayal” is not that events failed to occur as foretold, but that the descriptions were “insufficient to describe the horrors that occurred.” The events exceeded the content of the prophecy. The relation between prophecy and event is thus not one of simple identity. The prophecy does not contain the event as a part contains its whole, nor does the event complete the prophecy in a straightforward way. Instead, there is a gap, an excess of actuality over articulation. That gap is the first sign that the world here is not exhausted by what is said of it.

When the speaker declares that he “dwelt for an extended time / outside time,” the modal strain intensifies. To dwell outside time is not merely to be hidden or forgotten. It is to occupy a position that cannot be straightforwardly located within the usual ordering of past, present, and future. The “topmost room / of a narrow building” functions as a liminal site, elevated yet enclosed. From it he views “a city afire on the skyline.” The fire is temporally located; it is an event, a burning city. Yet the vantage point suggests a suspension of ordinary succession. If the speaker is outside time, the burning city may be both past and future, both remembered and foreseen. The poem does not specify. Instead, it holds the scene in a kind of modal indeterminacy. The fire could be what has already happened, what is happening, or what must happen. The speaker’s dwelling “outside time” destabilises any simple dependence of prophecy upon chronological sequence.

The third section introduces the greenwood and the scratch of “CYNEWULF” in runic script. The presence of the scratched name is a fragment of the past embedded in the environment. It is not simply a historical allusion but a part of the landscape. The runes are a trace, and that trace depends upon a prior act of inscription. Yet the landscape now contains it as a part. The sheds and outhouses hold “the residue of my old enthusiasms,” suggesting that the speaker’s former identities persist as remnants. These remnants are not independent substances; they are parts of a larger whole that is the speaker’s life. The poem invites us to think of the person not as a simple, indivisible entity but as something composed of temporal and narrative parts. The old enthusiasms are parts that have been detached and stored. The runic name is another part, belonging to a predecessor. The greenwood becomes uncanny when the speaker steps past the grey stone because he crosses from one configuration of parts into another. The world shifts not by changing its material content but by rearranging the relations among its parts.

The forest scenes with “animal-masked and pelt-clad” figures and the “great house, with / its orgies and rites” introduce another level of modal play. These are not merely events in the speaker’s biography; they are ritual enactments that stage alternative orders of possibility. The orgies and rites suggest a world governed by different necessities, where the usual constraints on identity and behaviour are suspended. The “daughter of Harmonia, / coiled in her clearing,” evokes a mythic serpent figure, perhaps Echidna or some chthonic power. The speaker avoids her, and his avoidance depends upon a token bearing “an / image of the measurer, his lion / head circled by rays.” This token is a sign of order, of measure, perhaps of a solar or rational principle. The protection it affords is conditional: “If / that favour should be withdrawn, / I would surrender myself to her / before I could be expelled.” The conditional clause reveals the modal structure explicitly. If the favour is withdrawn, surrender would follow. The speaker’s survival in the forest is not an absolute fact but depends upon the persistence of a particular relation, the continued favour signified by the token. The poem thereby renders agency as contingent upon dependencies that are not under the speaker’s direct control.

The identification in section six, “I am that poet who composed / the ‘Shoulder Bite’,” further complicates personhood. The speaker identifies himself with a series of works that recount transformation, violence, and ritual inversion. To say “I am that poet” is not merely to assert authorship. It is to equate oneself with a body of texts. The person becomes coextensive with his works, or at least constituted in part by them. These works are parts of the speaker’s identity, and they persist independently of his present state. They also bring with them modal commitments. A poem about Philomela presupposes a world in which metamorphosis is possible. A queen arising from a “blood-smeared bed” to go “a-Maying” with a bear-skinned man invokes a seasonal cycle in which death and renewal are interwoven. By claiming these works, the speaker aligns himself with worlds in which such transformations are compossible, where the human and animal, the courtly and the feral, coexist. The poem thus multiplies the possible worlds implicitly in play and binds the speaker to them.

Yet this multiplicity produces strain. In section seven, the speaker confesses that he “grew to distrust my own mouth.” The mouth, once a channel for “complex / secretions of a priestess,” now speaks only fragments. The imagery of secretion suggests an organic dependence: speech flowed as part of a bodily and perhaps divine process. Now that process is broken. The fragments indicate a failure of compositional unity. The person, once a coherent whole, now appears as a collection of disconnected parts. The shift from visionary to “sensualist” and then to “miser” can be read as a reconfiguration of parts within the same individual. Each role is a different arrangement of capacities and commitments. The visionary depends upon inspiration; the sensualist upon bodily pleasure; the miser upon accumulation. None exhausts the whole, and the transitions among them are not governed by strict necessity. They represent alternative ways the same person might be, each compossible with certain aspects of his past but not with others. The speaker’s distrust of his mouth signals an awareness that his present configuration no longer grounds the prophetic speech of earlier sections.

The rejection of the “decadence of the grammarians” in section eight reinforces this tension. The grammarians seek to extract “pickings / from that splintered mouth.” They would treat his utterances as parts to be analysed, categorised, perhaps canonised. The speaker resists this. He places “no faith in any / language but that which had been / channelled through me.” Channelled language is dependent upon an external source; it is not generated by the speaker alone. The act of channelling implies a vertical dependence, from some higher or deeper level into the mouth. Such transmissions “wore me hollow,” suggesting that the speaker becomes a vessel, his own substance depleted by the flow. Here the person is not the ground of his speech but its conduit. The hollowing out implies that what we might call the core of the self is replaced by the speech that passes through it. This destabilises the notion of agency. If speech is channelled, the speaker’s agency is derivative. He is a medium rather than an originator.

The “teacher” of section nine introduces a different form of dependence. The speaker claims to be instructed by “nobody other than the teacher / from whom I learned thumbnail / divination.” Thumbnail divination is a minor, almost trivial form of prophecy, reading images in a polished surface. The teacher leads him “in silence / across a bleak field to show / me the crow trap.” The allegory of the trap is not understood until “the moulting cage had enclosed me.” The trap encloses the bird, and later the speaker himself. The relation between teacher and student is thus one of delayed understanding. The student’s comprehension depends upon his own entrapment. The allegory is a structure that anticipates its own repetition. The teacher shows a configuration of parts, the trap, and the student later becomes a part within an analogous configuration. This recursive dependence suggests that knowledge is not simply transmitted but enacted. The modal pressure here is that of inevitability. Once shown the trap, the student is already, in a sense, on the path to becoming trapped.

Section ten’s search “among the jumbled bones of men / and horses” for “that book of the notary / art rumoured to pillow the skull / of Chiron” weaves together pagan myth and bureaucratic inscription. The bones are remnants, parts of once-living wholes. The book of notary art suggests written authority, perhaps legal or magical. Chiron, the wise centaur, embodies a hybrid identity, part man, part horse. The search among bones for a book under a skull places text beneath death, knowledge under the remains of wisdom. The “apostle, my / namesake” who “stood in reverence / before his enthroned corpse” further layers identities. The speaker’s namesake, an apostle, reveres a pagan corpse. The poem thus constructs a network of dependence among traditions. Christian reverence depends upon pagan wisdom; the apostle’s gesture mirrors the speaker’s own search. Personhood becomes a node in a web of intertextual and intertraditional relations, each part dependent upon others for its meaning.

When the speaker “became old at last, and / subject to infatuation,” the modal field narrows. Age brings relief: “It / was a relief to let age overtake me.” The necessity here is biological. Age overtakes; it is not chosen. The speaker ceases to conceal decay. The earlier modal expansiveness of prophecy and ritual gives way to the necessity of bodily decline. Yet even here, the evaluation “It seemed pitiful / that I had exhausted myself in order / to accomplish so little” introduces a counterfactual dimension. The speaker judges his life against what might have been accomplished. The sense of futility arises from comparing the actual trajectory with imagined alternatives. The modal space of possibility remains active, even as the body decays.

The descent in section twelve, where the speaker is “taken under / the ground, still alive,” literalises the movement from elevated vantage point to subterranean existence. He is “not to be raised, / but carried further down into / their phosphorescent halls.” The beings who carry him are not named, but their “phosphorescent halls” suggest a luminous underworld. The hospitality he receives is unexpected, and he “had / no idea what effect their hospitality / would have upon me.” The modal uncertainty is explicit. The effect is unknown. The speaker is once again in a position where his state depends upon forces beyond his anticipation. The underground halls introduce another level of reality, one in which limbless bodies emit light.

Section thirteen elaborates this subterranean existence. The speaker “existed as they existed,” resting among “their pale limbless / bodies.” The phrase “existed as they existed” suggests a parity of being. The speaker becomes part of a collective, sharing their mode of existence. As they “slowly dried out / into brittle shells,” the light around each dwindles. The realisation that “It / had never occurred to me that they / might have been its source” marks a profound shift. The light, which might have been assumed to depend upon some external source, is now understood as dependent upon the beings themselves. The dependence relation is inverted. What was taken as derivative is revealed as foundational. This recognition reverberates back through the poem. The token of the measurer, the channelled language, the prophetic visions may all have been understood as deriving from higher sources. The subterranean revelation suggests that light, meaning, and perhaps prophecy may arise from within the very beings who seemed secondary.

The final section returns to the withheld prophecy. “My prophecies had all been / made known, apart from one / which I chose to withhold.” The act of withholding is an exercise of agency. Unlike earlier moments where speech was channelled or dependent upon tokens, here the speaker chooses silence. He will “contemplate in the darkness / and solitude in which I acquired my / craft, the darkness and solitude / in which I shall forget it.” The forgetting is as deliberate as the withholding. The prophecy exists, but it will not enter the network of inscriptions and events that characterised the earlier prophecies. It will remain in darkness and then be forgotten. This introduces a paradox. A prophecy that is forgotten cannot guide or foretell. Its content remains unrealised in the communal world. The speaker’s choice creates a divergence between possible futures. One in which the prophecy is uttered and perhaps shapes events, and one in which it is not. By choosing silence, the speaker alters the modal landscape. He reduces the set of futures that will be actualised.

Throughout the poem, the interplay between prophecy and event generates modal tension. Prophecy, by its nature, speaks of what must or will occur. Yet the speaker’s admission of insufficiency suggests that prophecy does not fully determine the future. There is a gap between what is foretold and what happens. This gap can be read as a space of freedom, or as a sign that the future is not entirely fixed by prophetic speech. The speaker’s timidity in describing horrors implies that the horror was not necessitated by his words. The words failed to capture the event, but they did not cause it. The relation between speech and event is thus not one of strict dependence. Instead, prophecy is one part in a larger configuration of causes and conditions.

The poem’s sly nods to other works of supernatural literature deepen this modal play. The burning city on the skyline evokes not only apocalyptic scenes but also the vision of Birnam Wood moving towards Dunsinane in Macbeth. The uncanny greenwood that shifts as the speaker steps past the grey stone recalls the forest that seems fixed but then reveals itself as mobile. In Macbeth, prophecy and equivocation create a sense of necessity that is later revealed to be conditional. The witches’ words are true, but their truth depends upon oblique interpretations. Similarly, the token bearing the lion head circled by rays may recall the equivocal signs that Macbeth misreads. The speaker’s protection is conditional; if the favour is withdrawn, he would surrender. The structure is akin to the witches’ prophecies, which are true under certain interpretations but mislead the hearer about the full range of possibilities.

The “crow trap” allegory can also be read alongside Macbeth’s entrapment in the web of prophecy. The crow, often associated with ill omen, is trapped by a device whose operation it does not comprehend. Macbeth is trapped by his own ambition and by the partial truths of the witches. The speaker’s failure to comprehend the allegory until enclosed suggests that knowledge of one’s own entrapment comes too late. The modal pressure here is that of self-fulfilling structures. Once one enters the configuration of prophecy and ambition, certain outcomes become increasingly likely, perhaps inevitable. Yet the poem resists a simple fatalism. The speaker’s final withholding of prophecy indicates that alternative paths remain.

The interplay between levels of reality in the poem invites reflection on communication between levels. The channelled language in section eight implies a vertical communication from some higher plane into the speaker. The subterranean hospitality in section twelve implies a horizontal communication with beings who share a different mode of existence. The token of the measurer represents a symbolic communication between human and divine orders. These communications are not symmetrical. The speaker receives from above, is protected by a sign, and is later sustained by underground beings whose light he had not recognised as self-generated. The poem thus stages a series of dependence relations among levels: the prophetic level, the ritual level, the biological level of ageing, and the subterranean level of limbless luminous beings. None of these levels is presented as wholly independent. Each depends upon others for its articulation.

Personhood in the poem emerges as layered and composite. The speaker is a prophet, a poet, a sensualist, a miser, a student, an old man, and finally a subterranean companion of limbless beings. Each of these identities is a part of the whole, yet the whole is not reducible to any one part. The transitions among identities suggest that personhood is not fixed but reconfigured over time. The dependencies among these identities are complex. The prophet depends upon inspiration; the poet upon tradition; the sensualist upon bodily pleasure; the miser upon material accumulation; the student upon a teacher; the old man upon biological necessity; the subterranean companion upon the hospitality of others. The self is thus a nexus of dependencies, not an autonomous centre.

The temporal structure of the poem further complicates the modal picture. The speaker moves from past prophecies to present exhaustion to subterranean existence that may be ongoing or completed. The claim to have dwelt “outside time” destabilises the chronology. The withheld prophecy, to be forgotten in darkness, gestures towards a future that will not be actualised. The poem thus holds together past, present, and future in a single reflective voice. This voice surveys its life as a whole, yet also acknowledges the limitations of its perspective. The insufficiency of prophecy suggests that even an overview of one’s life does not capture the full range of possibilities and actualities.

The subterranean light revelation in section thirteen offers a subtle reconfiguration of dependence. Earlier, the speaker relied upon a token bearing the image of the measurer for protection. This suggests a dependence upon a higher, perhaps divine order. In the underworld, he realises that the light surrounding the limbless beings may have been sourced from them. The implication is that what appears derivative may in fact be fundamental. The beings’ light does not depend upon an external source but is intrinsic to them. This challenges the earlier assumption that protection and illumination come from above. It suggests a model in which beings generate their own light, and perhaps their own meaning. The speaker’s earlier hollowing out by channelled language may have been a misrecognition of the source of his own speech. Perhaps the light and the words arose from within, rather than being imposed from without.

This inversion resonates with the final withholding of prophecy. If light and speech can arise from within, then the speaker’s choice to withhold and forget is an assertion of internal sourcehood. He need not depend upon external validation or transmission. He can let the prophecy die within him. This act reclaims agency in a way that earlier sections did not permit. The modal field narrows to a single path, chosen by the speaker. The future in which the prophecy is uttered is no longer compossible with the future in which it is forgotten. By choosing one, he excludes the other.

The poem’s careful economy of images and allusions intensifies this modal drama. The burning city, the uncanny greenwood, the runic scratch, the animal-masked rites, the serpent daughter, the lion-headed measurer, the crow trap, the bones of Chiron, the apostolic reverence, the phosphorescent halls, the brittle shells: each image is a node in a network of possibilities. They evoke worlds in which pagan and Christian, classical and Anglo-Saxon, ritual and bureaucratic, surface and subterranean coexist. Yet these worlds are not fully harmonised. They strain against one another. The token of the measurer and the daughter of Harmonia represent incompatible orders. The apostle revering the pagan teacher’s corpse suggests a layering rather than a synthesis. The poem’s world is thus not a single coherent cosmos but a collection of partially overlapping domains. Some are compossible, others only tenuously so.

The speaker’s life can be read as an attempt to navigate these domains without collapsing into one. His early prophecies attempted to articulate horrors that exceeded his timidity. His dwelling outside time placed him in a vantage point that blurred past and future. His retreat into sensualism and miserliness represented attempts to anchor himself in bodily and material necessity. His descent underground exposed him to a community whose light he misapprehended. At each stage, he reconfigured the dependencies that defined him. The poem suggests that personhood is not a fixed essence but a dynamic arrangement of parts and relations, subject to modal pressures from prophecy, tradition, biology, and communal existence.

The withholding of the final prophecy can thus be seen as a refusal to impose further modal necessity upon the world. Prophecy, once uttered, constrains the imagination of the future. It creates expectations, perhaps self-fulfilling structures. By withholding, the speaker releases the future from that constraint. He allows for a broader range of possibilities to remain open, even if he himself will forget the content. The darkness and solitude in which he acquired his craft are reclaimed not as sources of compulsion but as spaces of quiet renunciation.

In this light, the poem can be understood as a meditation on the burden of modal authority. To prophesy is to speak as if one knows what must or will be. Such speech carries weight. It shapes the self and others. The speaker’s recognition of his insufficiency and his eventual silence suggest a humility before the complexity of the world. The horrors that occurred were not exhausted by his words. The light that shone was not necessarily imposed from above. The future need not be fully articulated in advance.

The poem’s tight, austere language mirrors this thematic restraint. It does not elaborate its symbols beyond necessity. Each section is self-contained yet linked by recurring motifs of light and darkness, elevation and descent, speech and silence. The result is a layered meditation in which modal structures, mereological composition, and dependence relations are not abstractly theorised but embodied in the life of a single, haunted speaker. The poem invites us to inhabit that life as a configuration of parts and possibilities, to feel the pressure of prophecy and the relief of its renunciation, and to consider how our own personhood might likewise be a shifting arrangement within a field of constrained and unconstrained futures.

“Demonstrances” is printed in Angel Exhaust number Twenty-Four: Your Mind is a Locked Room & Maria Holds the Key.

More of Richard Marshall’s writing and artwork can be found at 3:16.