Afterward, the compromise.
Bodies resume their boundaries.
These legs, for instance, mine.
Your arms take you back in.
Spoons of our fingers, lips
admit their ownership.
The bedding yawns, a door
blows aimlessly ajar
and overhead, a plane
singsongs coming down.
Nothing is changed, except
there was a moment when
the wolf, the mongering wolf
who stands outside the self
lay lightly down, and slept.
Let me look on nothing like myself --
let me look on wild orders.
There are always wars at the borders,
there are always borders.
What keeps plant from animal but a name
hidden somewhere inside?
What keeps saint from murderer but a refusal
to accept the blame?
-- I came as close as any came.
O tongue of seeded flame,
O visitant of the rank and tattered petals,
let me be butterfly, or blank
as the heart of a star, heart of water:
come battering
the gates apart, lord hawk, lord frog, lord thing,
but teach me how to sing.
I'm really very fond of you,
he said.
I don't like fond.
It sounds like something
you would tell a dog.
Give me love,
or nothing.
Throw your fond in a pond,
I said.
But what I felt for him
was also warm, frisky,
moist-mouthed,
eager,
and could swim away.
if forced to do so.
A man saw a ball of gold in the sky;
He climbed for it,
And eventually he achieved it --
It was clay.
Now this is the strange part:
When the man went to the earth
And looked again,
Lo, there was the ball of gold.
Now this is the strange part:
It was a ball of gold.
Aye, by the heavens, it was a ball of gold.
