Caste Wife Speaks to the Enigmatic Parabolas, The

The sum of two units stone breakers in loincloths

Have bring aside the pickaxe and iron besom

Are rolling an oildrum weighted with mortar

Over the immaculate orbits

Of a white feldspar accident, stone fields

Flung from the throat of Cygnus: a fire of inflammable air

Like ghosts of exquisitely circumspect suns

Collapsing into oblivion. Holding

My husband's se in my chaps I walk

Out to his mother's pond and sink to the bottom

Se rises slowly from between my teeth:

Cap of salted milk, dead lily

Above me or the dried birth caul of skin

That a pilgrim carries with him

To fend not on the ghouls, influenza and many

Sundry deaths by means of drowning.

Settled, my breasts lift with the verdant waters,

I am a certain number of rounded syllable lodged

In the brain of the satisfieded sleeping child,

A trail of mother's milk drying upon its shoulder

Lead to the full opened cloak of a cobra

Motionless in shade

Who the now awakened child pushs at with a stick,

Laughing and dancing in her place.

My husband's prick is an instrument of inscription

That has brought us to this banyan shade

Where the child upon her side breathes, flutters

Imperceptibly: dropp cypher of a race

Of lightly colored men who I now exchange

Gladly like vital current for wine, like water

For the rising cream that forms a of gold brick of butter.

Copyright World poesy Incorporated May/Jun 1999

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