i.
Death of my child who shares my body comes.
Autumn is a petticoat beneath the skirts of August.
O God in life and life in God,
like a trinity identical,
whose Name is pure semantics,
who is worshipped where the fibre-end
of love springs its hairlike root,
who is worshipped with a book
or with teeth flaring at the sky.
ii.
Against the simper of the sideways lioness
eating unborn children in the black age of her mouth,
I will make my fingers to a lance,
my veins into pins, and leave
my eyes and ribcage like tilled soil,
like the water’s stretch of surface tension.
Forge this body from its own melted mould.
This is the life upon the lines,
the hardest stone to set to, being soft.
iii.
I take this, death inside a day’s membrane,
a fan of lives within duration
of a sole mortality.
I take this, where the hourhand is fatal,
where the eveningline calls in the doves and fire.
Praise those fictions, but also praise the chase
that bleeds challenge on reality.
I build my time like a hut of sticks on the shore
of a hurricane delta. O my God: never give me ease.
