On the Brink
... to breathe this element of muted sound
and think only the things that fishes do ...! I, squat on the parapet, look down. My mind, lapped in that weed-lucent brown Mapping the mossy under-arch with light hereunder shimmering ... lean over! Look! See? Touch it! (Not too far. Don’t fall. Not yet.) Trickery, you see. The bright thing, like all wind-spun happiness, shook and left you to the darkness ... yea my mind moves to the slap and the sway of it. ... shall I be feeding the fishes, now? Or will the fishes give me to eat corals, rocksand, sunlight filtering, turtleshell, chilled fringes of moon; weed-broth from the crab’s mouth and mud sifted in silver, seasoned with seed-pearls, served in a mussel-shell with a spoon? Come come, itty-bitty man! Come come! The fishes sing. One for Mummy, one for Daddy, eat your nice pudding! Ha! The blue waves. New and drinkable sky. Out there where the rainbow lives and soon shall I. The men who poison the rainbow poison the mind of me with an ill wind, and a sick rain, and they drive me to the sea; and the sun lies in a crooked way, and gods die as people pray, and fear spreads fungous through decay. But I shall soon be free ... ... soon in the sun-silk water I shall drop away, leaving my clothes behind, for there is blight on them. Soon I am ready. Are you coming with me? ... leaving your clothes behind, for there is blight on them. Why don’t you take them off? Take off your clothes, I say! Your soul is rotting with it - I can see the mark, mark of a madman. Stay behind and save the world! I shall be under the bridges that you burn crowned with a crown of swimming sticklebacks to keep the twisted thorns out of my hair. Washed in the running radiance of pearls I’ll have sweet skin, and I shall laugh! as stern Nemesis chokes you in your deadly air. |