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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