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2. the bath My sisters walk around touching things, or loll On the bed with last month’s New Yorkers. My skin, Beaded with bath-oil, gleams like a hot-house fake: My body holds me like an empty bowl. It is three, it is four, it is time to come in From thinking about the cake to eat the cake. My sisters’ voices whir like cardboard birds On sticks: married, they flutter and wheel to find In this misted looking-glass their own lost words, In the exhaled smoke. There isn’t a sound, Even the shadows compose like waiting wings. I am the hollow circle closed by the ring. 3. night I am thrown open like a child’s damp hand In sleep. You turn your back in sleep, unmanned. How can I be so light, at the core of things? My way was long and crooked to your hand! What could your jeweled glove command But flight of my stone wings? Our honeymoon lake, ignoring the lit-up land, Shows blank Orion where to dip his hand. Afterbirth I loiter in the eye of the Slough, Every joint aching for sleep; The sky, inhumanly deep, Sarcastically casts back the Slough. Did my child take breath to cry At the slick hand that hooked her out, 52 door in the mountain Or cry to breathe? or did she lie Still in her private dark, curled taut Under her sleep’s hobgoblin shout? Anesthesia blew me out: I gardened shadows in my lost crib While they took her from me like a rib. Swaddled and barred, she curls in sleep At the dry edge of mortality. If the sky’s side proves too steep Who will take up the little old lady, Who will call her by her name When she’s a crumble of bones? What logos lights the filament of time, Carbon arc fusing birth-stone to head-stone? The mud pulls harder: the stepping stones Shake in front of my swimming eyes. There dear, there dear, here’s a pill: Sleep, sleep, all will be well: Lull-lullaby. Sarah’s Christening Day Our Lord, today is Sarah’s christening day. I wouldn’t build the child a house of straw, Teach her to wait and welcome the holy face With candles of prayer, or pray, if the wager were all. But I have never seen or loved the holy face. I don’t believe the half of what I pray. This world is straw: straw mother, father, friend, Per omnia saecula saeculorum, amen. But Lord! it shines, it shines, like light, today. dream barker 53 ...

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