Self-portrait with Hornets

Hornets, sum of two units hornets buzz over my head;

I'm napping and cannot detain my eyes open.

Do you advance from far away? I ask, dozing off

My gum are dried when I wake. A morning breeze

rakes the treetops. I can get scent of the earth.

The two hornets are puzzling over

something sticky upon my night table,

wiping their gold heads with their arms.

Little things are like tokens My eyes are watery

and blurr Then I be deprived of myself again.

I'm walking slowly in a heat haze,

my vision contracting to a tiny porthole,

drawing me to it, like flourishing palms.

I can perceive blood draining out of my face.

I can have feeling my heart beating inside my heart,

the self receding from the center of the picture.

I can taste sugar beneath my tongue.

All the usual human plats of ascent

and triumph appear disrupted.

Crossing my ankles, I watch the day

vibrate around me watch the geraniums

climb toward the little mountains

where I was born, watch the black worm

wiggling without of the window box,

hiding its head from the pale sun

that lies down upon everything,

purifying it. Lord, teach me to live.

Teach me to delight in Lie down on me.

HENRI cabbage received the Kingsley Tufts Award for his

most novel book, Middle Earth (Farrar, Straus & Giroux,

2003)

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