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ARMOR When this is the thing you put on The world is pieced slowly together In the power of the crab and the insect. The make of the eyeball changes As over your mouth you draw down A bird's bill made for a man. As your weight upon earth is redoubled There is no way of standing alone More, or no way of being More with the bound, shining dead. You have put on what you should wear, Not into the rattling of battle, But into a silence where nothing Threatens but Place itself: the shade Of the forest, the strange, crowned Motionless sunlight of Heaven, With the redbird blinking and shooting Across the nailed beam of the eyepiece. In that light, in the wood, in armor, I look in myself for the being I was in a life before life In a glade more silent than breathing, Where I took off my body of metal Like a brother whose features I knew By the feel of their strength on my face And whose limbs by the shining of mine. In a vision I fasten him there, The bright locust shell of my strength Like a hanged man waiting in Heaven, And then steal off to my life. In my home, a night nearer death, I wake with no shield on my breastbone, Breathing deep through my sides like an insect, Drowning With Others 81 My closed hand falling and rising Where it lies like the dead on my heart. I cannot remember my brother; Before I was born he went from me Ablaze with the meaning of typhoid. In a fever I see him turn slowly Under the strange, perfect branches Where somehow I left him to wait That I might be naked on earth, His crowned face dazzingly closed, His curving limbs giving off Pure energy into the leaves. When I give up my hold on my breath I long to dress deeply at last In the gold of my waiting brother Who shall wake and shine on my limbs As I walk, made whole, into Heaven. I shall not remember his face Or my dazed, eternal one Until I have opened my hand And touched the grave glow of his breast To stop the gaunt turning of metal: Until I have let the still sun Down into the stare of the eyepiece And raised its bird's beak to confront What man is within to live with me When I begin living forever. 82 ...

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