images burn to dark: only one remains: the dream of the corpse of myself:
dissolving to lustreless hair and bone: pressed into cold: taped to
the ground by rags of plastic:
yet still alive: a mystery! and red eyes stretching again for sleep:
I might have begged mercy from a milky goddess: if she were still
there to be invoked:
I might have stretched my arms to the dead: tracing their paths
across the meadows of fable: counting their arms and wounds: naming
the empire:
I might have consulted a witch: and been consoled by the hanged man:
I might have imagined numbers and thrown the alchemical coins:
I might have entered the city of lamps: and cheered the athletes
leaping in ovals: and racing drivers stinking of grease and petrol:
and lost myself in crowds: and found myself in the whispering bars:
and stumbled in wastelands of rape where drugs burn on the tarmac:
or haggled for trash shipped from Korean sweatshops: desiring the
silks of Samarkand: the fragrant cedars of Lebanon: the deadly
white Elizabethan powders:
I might have searched out libraries: tracing letters of eyelash and
fingernail: the periodicity of smiles:
the kick in the womb my preface: my final word the cover closing:
and shelves unnumbered stretching to darkness behind me: and dust
falling eternally in the starless rooms of the mind:
but my breath would not be still: the earth stretched its graves
beneath me: the air brightened with bodiless voices: the continents
ground together on seas of magma:
I opened myself: the wise and the foolish: the lost and the losing:
the godly and gone: the empty hand and the nameless mind:
awaiting the blow on the face: the blasted train: the tide with its
lifeless fish: the cells rebelling under the skin: the choke of
thickening air: the clutch of dust in an empty room: invisible
nuclear fires: a slow lengthening aeon unpeopled by trees:
how big is fear? as small as a cloud: as wide as a pill: deep
enough to swallow: and that other whose face I can't admit:
whose eyes were these before I took their tenancy? whose was this
voice? what does it matter? there's nothing that is mine:
no country no city no breath no garden no language not even a shadow:
I and the billion others:
dreamless and naked among the ruins of giants: woken too late for
paradise: stinking of money and death:
the string vibrates and is still: the leaf opens and shrivels:
cities fall into their sewers: foot follows foot:
masters of business sow their hygienic crops: wars breed in the borders:
chastened angels weave each morning out of the rags of night
--
Alison Croggon
Editor, Masthead
http://au.geocities.com/masthead_2/
Home page
http://www.users.bigpond.com/acroggon/
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