Tercet

When I woke the darkness was so thick,
So palpable and black that my eyes
Seemed blind as stone staring into stone.

The blade that I had dreamed, efficient and quick
As it cut into my thigh, cleaning a gangrened
Wound infected to the bone, seemed poised

Above my throat: Close-grained, impenetrable,
The blackness rose before me like a wall.
And then off in the next room, nervous, light,

A soft padding as of an animal
Raced like my heartbeat in my temples
Round and round, trapped, stealthily desperate

The palm at the end of the mind,
Beyond the last thought, rises
In the bronze decor,

A gold-feathered bird
Sings in the palm, without human meaning,
Without human feeling, a foreign song.

You know then that it is not the reason
That makes us happy or unhappy.
The bird sings. Its feathers shine.

The palm stands on the edge of space.
The wind moves slowly in the branches.
The bird's fire-fangled feathers dangle down.

Sometimes I sit in my blue chair trying to remember
what it was like in the spring of 1950
before the burning coal entered my life.

I study my red hand under the faucet, the left one
below the grease line consisting of four feminine angels
and one crooked broken masculine one

and the right one lying on top of the white porcelain
with skin wrinkled up like a chicken's
beside the razor and the silver tap.

I sat all morning in the college sick bay
Counting bells knelling classes to a close.
At two o'clock our neighbours drove me home.

In the porch I met my father crying —
He had always taken funerals in his stride —
And Big Jim Evans saying it was a hard blow.

The baby cooed and laughed and rocked the pram
When I came in, and I was embarrassed
By old men standing up to shake my hand

And tell me they were 'sorry for my trouble'.
Whispers informed strangers I was the eldest,
Away at school, as my mother held my hand

Think of the storm roaming the sky uneasily
like a dog looking for a place to sleep in,
listen to it growling.

Think how they must look now, the mangrove keys
lying out there unresponsive to the lightning
in dark, coarse-fibred families,

where occasionally a heron may undo his head,
shake up his feathers, make an uncertain comment
when the surrounding water shines.

Think of the boulevard and the little palm trees
all stuck in rows, suddenly revealed
as fistfuls of limp fish-skeletons.

The word penis is probably the most misattributed word in
English, I think. Because almost nobody has a real one.
The standards are made in Japanese or German factories.

Womb/vagina sets are unusual too if genuine.
Standards are from China; they are recycled sheepskin wallets.
I was shocked too when I heard this.

I do not have an actual either but they called
me a genius when I figured it out about the fetal
lamb/sheep skin. What else to do with all the wallets

I’ m in the barricade hearing the clock thickening you.
Autumn encircles a confusion that’ s nothing new.
Flash back to warring eyes almost letting me drown.

Out of which, a picture of me walking in a foreign head.
I can’ t hear what you said. Then you say: Cold room,
the second that life unwinds. A tinctured vase returns

The tint of the sky between sunset and night.

And wandering with you and your nephew
in that maze, half-lost — Madrid
of the Austrias — looking for Plaza of the Green

Cross where, days before you arrived,
an Opel with false plates was parked, its wheels
straddling the curb, and so the van

heading for the barracks that morning
had to slow to squeeze
past... Back at the hotel your mom

is holding up her gift — Amethyst, she says
admiring how light
when passing through a prism

I woke. A tiny knot of skin on a silver table
Set in the birth-theater, blinking in the glare
Of electric lights and a strange arranged

Passel of faces: huge as gods in their council.
I was the actor who forgets his lines and enters
On stage suddenly wanting to say, I am.

I was almost all eye: they weighed me down,
Two lump-big brown-sugar bags in a face
Which did not yet know struggle, burden;

Gregarious in hunger, a flock of twenty
turn circles like whorls of barbed wire,
no spot below flown over uncanvassed.

The closer to death the closer they come,
waiting on wings with keen impatient
perseverance, dark blades lying in wake

until age or wound has turned canter
into carcass or near enough for them
to swoop scrupulous in benediction,

land hissing, hopping, tearing, gorging.
no portion, save bone, too durable
to digest. What matters cannot remain.