After a night of rage that lasted days quarrels in a forest, waterfalls, exchanges, marriage, exploration of bays and places we had never known We would never know my wife's always changing syriac face, chosen of all faces a pouting difficult child's changing in the chameleon emerald wilderness of Kerala small cousin to tall

mythic men, rubber plant and peppervine frocks with print patterns copied locally from the dotted butterfly, grandmother wearing white day and night in a village

full of the colour schemes of kraits and gartersnakes adolescent in Aden among stabbing Arabs, betrayed and whipped yet happy among ships in harbour and the evacuees the borrowed earth

under the borrowed trees, taught dry and wet hot and cold by the monsoon then, by the siroccos now on copper dustcones, the crater townships in the volcanoes of Aden

I dreamed one day that face my own yet hers with my own nowhere to be found lost, cut, loose like my dragnet past I woke up and groped turned on the realism of the ceiling light

found half a mirror in the mountain cabin fallen behind a dresser to look at my face now and the face of her sleep, still asleep and very syriac on the bed

behind: happy for once at such loss of face, whole in the ambivalence of being half-woman half-man contained in a common body, androgynous as a god balancing stillness in he middle of a duel to make it dance soon to be myself, a man unhappy in the morning to be himself again, the past still there a drying net on the mountain

in the morning, in the waking my wife's face still fast asleep blessed as by butterfly, snake, shiprope and grandmother's other children by my love's only insatiable envy

Tell a wise person, or else keep silent, because the mass man will mock it right away. I praise what is truly alive, what longs to be burned to death.

In the calm water of the love-nights, where you were begotten, where you have begotten, a strange feeling comes over you, when you see the silent candle burning.

Now you are no longer caught in the obsession with darkness, and a desire for higher love-making sweeps you upward.

Distance does not make you falter. Now, arriving in magic, flying, and finally, insane for the light, you are the butterfly and you are gone. And so long as you haven't experienced this: to die and so to grow, you are only a troubled guest on the dark earth.

The world is a beautiful place to be born into if you don't mind happiness not always being so very much fun if you don't mind a touch of hell now and then just when everything is fine because even in heaven they don't sing all the time

The world is a beautiful place to be born into if you don't mind some people dying all the time or maybe only starving some of the time which isn't half bad if it isn't you

Oh the world is a beautiful place to be born into if you don't much mind a few dead minds in the higher places or a bomb or two now and then in your upturned faces or such other improprieties as our Name Brand society is prey to with its men of distinction and its men of extinction and its priests and other patrolmen

and its various segregations and congressional investigations and other constipations that our fool flesh is heir to

Yes the world is the best place of all for a lot of such things as making the fun scene and making the love scene and making the sad scene and singing low songs and having inspirations and walking around looking at everything and smelling flowers and goosing statues and even thinking and kissing people and making babies and wearing pants and waving hats and dancing and going swimming in rivers on picnics in the middle of the summer and just generally 'living it up' Yes but then right in the middle of it comes the smiling mortician