VII LITTLE SLEEP'S-HEAD SPROUTING HAIR IN THE MOONLIGHT

1

You scream, waking from a nightmare.

When I sleepwalk into your room, and pick you up, and hold you up in the moonlight, you cling to me hard, as if clinging could save us. I think you think I will never die, I think I exude to you the permanence of smoke or stars, even as my broken arms heal themselves around you.

2

I have heard you tell the sun, don't go down, I have stood by as you told the flower, don't grow old, don't die. Little Maud,

I would blow the flame out of your silver cup, I would suck the rot from your fingernail, I would brush your sprouting hair of the dying light, I would scrape the rust off your ivory bones, I would help death escape through the little ribs of your body, I would alchemize the ashes of your cradle back into wood, I would let nothing of you go, ever, until washerwomen feel the clothes fall asleep in their hands, and hens scratch their spell across hatchet blades, and rats walk away from the cultures of the plague, and iron twists weapons toward the true north, and grease refuses to slide in the machinery of progress, and men feel as free on earth as fleas on the bodies of men, and lovers no longer whisper to the presence beside them in the dark, O corpse-to-be . . .

And yet perhaps this is the reason you cry, this the nightmare you wake screaming from: being forever in the pre-trembling of a house that falls.

3

In a restaurant once, everyone quietly eating, you clambered up on my lap: to all the mouthfuls rising toward all the mouths, at the top of your voice you cried your one word, caca! caca! caca! and each spoonful stopped, a moment, in midair, in its withering steam.

Yes, you cling because I, like you, only sooner than you, will go down the path of vanished alphabets, the roadlessness to the other side of the darkness,

your arms like the shoes left behind, like the adjectives in the halting speech of old men, which once could call up the lost nouns.

4

And you yourself, some impossible Tuesday in the year Two Thousand and Nine, will walk out among the black stones of the field, in the rain,

and the stones saying over their one word, ci-gît, ci-gît, ci-gît,

and the raindrops hitting you on the fontanel over and over, and you standing there unable to let them in.

5

If one day it happens you find yourself with someone you love in a cafe at one end of the Pont Mirabeau, at the zinc bar where white wine stands in upward opening glasses,

and if you commit then, as we did, the error of thinking, one day all this will only be memory,

learn, as you stand at this end of the bridge which arcs, from love, you think; into enduring love learn to reach deeper into the sorrows to come-to touch the almost imaginary bones under the face, to hear under the laughter the wind crying across the black stones. Kiss the mouth which tells you, here, here is the world. This mouth. This laughter. These temple bones.

The still undanced cadence of vanishing.

6

In the light the moon sends back, I can see in your eyes

the hand that waved once in my father's eyes, a tiny kite wobbling far up in the twilight of his last look:

and the angel of all mortal things lets go the string.

7

Back you go, into your crib.

The last blackbird lights up his gold wings: farewell. Your eyes close inside your head, in sleep. Already in your dreams the hours begin to sing.

Little sleep's-head sprouting hair in the moonlight, when I come back we will go out together,

we will walk out together among the ten thousand things, each scratched too late with such knowledge, the wages of dying is love.

As warm north rain breaks over suburb houses, Streaming on window glass, its drifting hazes Covering harbour ranges with a dense hood: I recall how eighteen months ago I stood Ankle-deep in sand on an Otago beach Watching the fireworks flare over strident surf and bach, In brain grey ash, in heart the sea-change flowing Of one love dying and another growing.

For love grows like the crocus bulb in winter Hiding from snow and from itself the tender Green frond in embryo; but dies as rockets die (White sparks of pain against a steel-dark sky) With firebird wings trailing an arc of grief Across a night inhuman as the grave, Falling at length a dull and smouldering shell To frozen dunes and the wash of the quenching swell.

There was little room left where the crowd had trampled Grass and lupin bare, under the pines that trembled In gusts from the sea. On a sandhillock I chose A place to watch from. Then the rockets rose, O marvellous, like self-destroying flowers On slender stems, with seed-pods full of flares, Raining down amber, scarlet, pennies from heaven On the skyward straining heads and still sea-haven. Had they brought death, we would have stood the same, I think, in ecstasy at the world-end flame.

It is the rain streaming reminds me of Those ardent showers, cathartic love and grief. As I walked home through the cold street by moon-light, My steps ringing in the October night, I thought of our strange lives, the grinding cycle Of death and renewal come to full circle, And of man's heart, that blind Rosetta stone, Mad as the polar moon, decipherable by none.

When the simplest is difficult, breathing for example and the difficult becomes simple, poetry for example

How does one explain such a state? Both love and lounging are so close, the twin heads of a janus night.

The moon hangs in the horizon and everything below is illuminated. Perhaps then this heart lies in deep shadows.

And I ask it, "Who has wounded you, my friend?" The reply: "None so far this night. Where is she, where is the beloved assasin with her cool and quick knife?"