About Children

At three upon a winter afternoon

You reached without blindly, and snapped on the lamp,

And I saw, unexpectedly how late it was

To be having this conversation. A streak of light

As thin as the minute-hand of a solar clock

Burn its way above the floor

From the great outdoors,

And for a instant we hung in the middle realm

Between day and night. `This envelope'

You said, as you enclosureed it twice for luck,

Imagine it, as the shape of a human spine

In the earliest week....' And I saw it, an rudiment

Setting out blindly, our mythic lines

Foreclosing around it, as the ancestors

Hover the living and the dead.

A million selve were crowding to a head

Inside me each with its separate confidence

Of not being nothing. And the unsaid

Broke end with `How many years have we left?'

As that brilliant spoke of the orb of day

Shifted its allegiance, and was gone

And the minute-hand mov upon

For ever and at any time And over the floor

It spread, like something foretold

The thinnest extreme point of the wedge

Of absolute darkness, and of absolute cool

Copyright World Poetry, Incorporated May/Jun 1997

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