The women with the heads of birds
are singing in the bright place
their tongues stitch the bright bones with flowers
on the final beach, atomic eggs on the white sand
the vanishing point like a well of ending
and the pail drops down, the water ringing in the dark dark dark
and the women spit stars in the wormy eyes of sailors
o my soul, have mercy
when I am stripped beyond naked
when I am undone, a mouthful of ash
when I am come at last to the hollow city's drowned battlements
when I have stretched my skin's boat across these splintered ribs
and sailed beyond the edges of the world,
o my kindly one have mercy
boatmen stand in the bright blast of heaven,
scraps of film develop in their pockets, tattered insignia
dropping among the bone thickets, the copper briars
and still you spin out the promise of angels,
honeyed traps of heaven and the faces of the dead
flowers turn their deaf heads towards the sun
in the windless calm, among the blooms sirens
sing a mantic song
prophesy to the worms
because the end of beauty is death
and when I am come at last to that shore I will carry your name
in my mouth, a bird with the head of a woman,
your fingers hooked in my collarbones
your breath in the windy hollow of my skull
in the marsh
in the islands in the sea of milk,
the labrynths of my days unwound
and you, spinner of my days
perch at the end of all threads and ways
at the end of all tales,
o my bird
o my tongue's confusion,
o my heaven, be with me even past the end
where the cold rocks scrape their tracks around the sun
where the radio coughs out its last in the icelight of stars
Monday, March 29, 2010
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