The Mirror

I can stay awake all night, if need be— Cold as an eel, without eyelids. Like a dead lake the dark envelops me, Blueblack, a spectacular plum fruit. No air bubbles start from my heart. I am lungless And ugly, my belly a silk stocking Where the heads and tails of my sisters decompose. Look, they are melting like coins in the powerful juices— The spidery jaws, the spine bones bared for a moment Like the white lines on a blueprint. Should I stir, I think this pink and purple plastic Guts bag would clack like a child's rattle, Old grievances jostling each other, so many loose teeth. But what so you know about that My fat pork, my marrowy sweetheart, face-to-the-wall? Some things of this world are indigestible. You wooed me with the wolf-headed fruit bats Hanging from their scorched hooks in the moist Fug of teh Small Mammal House. The armadillo dozed in his sandbin Obscene and bald as a pig, the white mice Multiplied to infinity like angels on a pinhead Out of s...

In the marketplace they are piling the dry sticks. A thicket of shadows is a poor coat. I inhabit The wax image of myself, a doll's body. Sickness begins here: I am the dartboard for witches. Only the devil can eat the devil out. In the month of red leaves I climb to a bed of fire. It is easy to blame the dark: the mouth of a door, The cellar's belly. They've blown my sparkler out. A black-sharded lady keeps me in parrot cage. What large eyes the dead have! I am intimate with a hairy spirit. Smoke wheels from the beak of this empty jar. If I am a little one, I can do no harm. If I don't move about, I'll knock nothing over. So I said, Sitting under a potlid, tiny and inert as a rice grain. They are turning the burners up, ring after ring. We are full of starch, my small white fellows. We grow. It hurts at first. The red tongues will teach the truth. Mother of beetles, only unclench your hand: I'll fly through the candle's mouth like a si...

You do not do, you do not do Any more, black shoe In which I have lived like a foot For thirty years, poor and white, Barely daring to breathe or Achoo. Daddy, I have had to kill you. You died before I had time—— Marble-heavy, a bag full of God, Ghastly statue with one gray toe Big as a Frisco seal And a head in the freakish Atlantic Where it pours bean green over blue In the waters off beautiful Nauset. I used to pray to recover you. Ach, du. In the German tongue, in the Polish town Scraped flat by the roller Of wars, wars, wars. But the name of the town is common. My Polack friend Says there are a dozen or two. So I never could tell where you Put your foot, your root, I never could talk to you. The tongue stuck in my jaw. It stuck in a barb wire snare. Ich, ich, ich, ich, I could hardly speak. I thought every German was you. And the language obscene. An engine, an engine Chuffing me off like a Jew. A Jew to Dachau, Auschwitz, Belsen. I began to...