My favourite cooks prepare my meals,
my body cleans and repairs itself,
and all my work goes well.
I 45
I T S W I N G S , JOCKO
It swings, Jocko,
but we do not want too much flesh in it.
Make it like fifteenth-century prayers,
love with no climax,
constant love,
and passion without flesh.
(Draw those out, Jocko,
like the long snake from Moses' arm;
how he must have screamed
to see a snake come out of him;
no wonder he never felt holy:
We want that scream tonight.)
Lightly, lightly,
I want to be hungry,
hungry for food,
for love, for flesh;
I want my dreams to be of deprivation,
gold thorns being drawn from my temples.
If I am hungry
then I am great,
and I love like the passionate scientist
who knows the sky
is made only of wave-lengths.
Now if you want to stand up,
stand up lightly,
we'll lightly march around the city.
I'm behind you, man,
and the streets are spread with chicks and palms,
white branches and summer arms.
We're going through on tiptoe,
like monks before the Virgin's statue.
We built the city,
we drew the water through,
we hang around the rinks,
the bars, the festive halls,
like Brueghel's men.
Hungry, hungry.
Come back, Jocko,
bring it all back for the people here,
it's your turn now.
I 47
C R E D O
A cloud of grasshoppers
rose from where we loved
and passed before the sun.
I wondered what farms
they would devour,
what slave people would go free
because of them.
I thought of pyramids overturned,
of Pharaoh hanging by the feet,
his body smeared-
Then my love drew me down
to conclude what I had begun.
Later, clusters of fern apart,
we lay.
A cloud of grasshoppers
passed between us and the moon,
going the other way,
each one fat and flying slow,
not hungry for the leaves and ferns
we rested on below.
The smell that burning cities give
was in the air.
Battalions of the wretched,
wild with holy promises,
soon passed our sleeping place;
they ran among
the ferns and grass.
I had two thoughts:
to leave my love
and join their wandering,
join their holiness;
or take my love
to the city they had fled:
That impoverished world
of boil-afflicted flesh
and rotting fields
could not tempt us from each other.
Our ordinary morning lust
claimed my body first
and made me sane.
I must not betray
the small oasis where we lie,
though only for a time.
It is good to live between
a ruined house of bondage
and a holy promised land.
A cloud of grasshoppers
will turn another Pharaoh upside-down;
slaves will build cathedrals
for other slaves to burn.
It is good to hear
the larvae rumbling underground,
good to learn
the feet of fierce or humble priests
trample out the green.
I 49
Y O U H A V E T H E L O V E R S
You have the lovers,
they are nameless, their histories only for each other,
and you have the room, the bed and the windows.
Pretend it is a ritual.
Unfurl the bed, bury the lovers, blacken the windows,
let them live in that house for a generation or two.
No one dares disturb them.
Visitors in the corridor tip-toe past the long closed door,
they listen for sounds, for a moan, for a song:
nothing is heard, not even breathing.
You know they are not dead,
you can feel the presence of their intense love.
Your children grow up, they leave you,
they have become soldiers and riders.
Your mate dies after a life of service.
Who knows you? Who remembers you?
But in your house a ritual is in progress:
it is not finished: it needs more people.
One day the door is opened to the lover's chamber.
The room has become a dense garden,
full of colours, smells, sounds you have never known.
The bed is smooth as a wafer of sunlight,
in the midst of the garden it stands alone.
In the bed the lovers, slowly and deliberately and silently,
perform the act of love.
Their eyes are closed,
as tightly as if heavy coins of flesh lay on them.
Their lips are bruised with new and old bruises.
Her hair and his beard are hopelessly tangled.
When he puts his mouth against her shoulder
she is uncertain whether her shoulder
has given or received the kiss.
5° I
All her flesh is like a mouth.
He carries his fingers along her waist
and feels his own waist caressed.
She holds him closer and his own arms tighten around her.
She kisses the hand beside her mouth.
It is his hand or her hand, it hardly matters,
there are so many more kisses.
You stand beside the bed, weeping with happiness,
you carefully peel away the sheets
from the slow-moving bodies.
Your eyes are filled with tears, you barely make out the
lovers.
As you undress you sing out, and your voice is magnificent
because now you believe it is the first human voice
heard in that room.
The garments you let fall grow into vines.
You climb into bed and recover the flesh.
You close your eyes and allow them to be sewn shut.
You create an embrace and fall into it.
There is only one moment of pain or doubt
as you wonder how many multitudes are lying beside your
body,
but a mouth kisses and a hand soothes the moment away.
I 51
O W N I N G E V E R Y T H I N G
For your sake I said I will praise the moon,
tell the colour of the river,
find new words for the agony
and ecstasy of gulls.
Because you are close,
everything that men make, observe
or plant is close, is mine:
the gulls slowly writhing, slowly singing
on the spears of wind;
the iron gate above the river;
the bridge holding between stone fingers
her cold bright necklace of pearls.
The branches of shore trees,
like trembling charts of rivers,
call the moon for an ally
to claim their sharp journeys
out of the dark sky,
but nothing in the sky responds.
The branches only give a sound
to miles of wind.
With your body and your speaking
you have spoken for everything,
robbed me of my strangerhood,
made me one
with the root and
