It will all end, this particular theater of perpetuum self
unbidden by any mastering hand.
I loved the straw ticking
that filled my chest. I loved the old hogshair adorning my scalp
and the feeling in dirt of my own stakes.
Being free has been its own poem
in a gilt-edged book, a field
shining at its edges around a blurred and glad scotoma.
The corn burns. Gases fix themselves to white hairs
deeper than the workers can see.
They trust the undertaking.
The appetites of soil.
Beyond what I need care for,
faint, near-identical garments are drying on a nylon line.
Should no one stop them
they will soon rock and puff in their lightness.
They torque where they’ve been clipped.
How happy they look, panting together. Something blue-white
out of Blake. They look like pillow mints
rattling off a bed.
Matter takes its charge from level to level.
I lived this stage as solid,
a boolean of dust. Knowing it’s more common
to be liquefied in flow. To pluralize, to them myself in others.
I expect that in my after. Unconscionable softness of a planet parting
crust from provisional crust. Baring and effacing
its faults. For the wet flame, the mantle
truer than any hill.
In that astonishing later I will speak into the mouth
of my fellows, which will also be my own
pressed mouth: Recall. Bevel of one
creaking limb sloped against starlight. Dry frost.
Mica fleck. Privacy was faienced blue
and lavished like a tomb. But we will not remember.
Lazarettoed in the wet of one rapport
we will not recall it.