Oh, how tired I am!
Too tired for sleep-
my legs like old lisle stockings stuffed with wet sand.
The city at night- it helps me remember,
whispering into my ear
(like the young man who fell in love with a drowned girl
whose skin and hair glimmered with an underwater green):
Once upon a time, I lived in a submarine hollow
with a ragged little dog;
so wet was the matted, dark hollow,
the ground in winter became a corpse
with that stale and pearly breath
that only a corpse can summon.
Come winter,
even the weeds stopped growing-
only the spackled black spores,
the burnished orange lichens
spattering the crooked timbers, flourished.
Things carelessly left lying about in summer
grew a serious skin of grey permanence during June and July;
then came August, and those once solid and useful objects
disintegrated to release the sooty mould of mortality.
Scourer-pads of moss metastasized into a green, malignant mat
that crept over gravel,
encasing weeds in a spongy webbing.
You ventured into the bottom paddock and found
it had become a frigid mire that sucked away your breath,
a sepulchral mush, a primeval swamp squelching underfoot,
scaffolded by sedges sprung with wire and rust.
And on returning, oh! the dismal dreariness of the empty room
without a fire to give it heart,
Is there heart here? the gypsies used to call,
on encountering a gadjo’s dull camp.
Summer will come again,
the fire will chaw and spit its mouthful of acrid heat;
one day soon there will be heart again
in that edifice so cunningly built in the shape of my life.
One day soon, the spark will strike dry wattle twigs
and my sons and daughters will glow in its ragged flare.
