from Totem Poem [If every step taken is a step well-lived]

And if every step taken is a step well-lived but a foot
towards death, every pilgrimage a circle, every flight-path
the tracing of a sphere: I will give myself over and over.
I have migrated through Carpathians of sorrow
to myself heaped happy in the corner there.
 
Nothing seemed strange in the world, you’ll understand—
nothing ever more would. Monkey Boy came to me saying
Look—the moon of the moon. The little one circled the big one.
He crouched in the palm of my hand, tiny, sincere,
pointing at the sky. There was something sad about him.
 
The python was nothing, nothing at all, nothing
but strength shed to suppleness, nothing but will
encased in itself. The python was a muscle of thought.
Coiled and mute, in a place where nothing but rain fell,
the python thought: this is the beginning or end of the world.
 
The python was everywhere, everywhere at once, aware
only too much of that ageless agony: its existence.
I am tired, it said; and the stream burbled by.
I am waiting for the recoil, the uncoil, coil of night,
coil of stars, coil of the coldness of the water.
 
The python said Who are these people?
The whole city sweated, moved like a limb. The air
fitted like a glove two sizes too small and too many
singers sang the banal. The bars roared all night.
The kite hawks grew ashamed. All nature squirmed.
 
In the yellow time of pollen there’s a certain slant of light
that devours the afternoon, and you would wait forever
at the Gare de l’Est, if time stood still, if she would come.
She is the leopard then, its silvery speed; where will you
wrestle her, and in what shadows, and on what crumpled sheets?
 
And all those sheets were pampas and savannas, the soft expanses
of all that would be absent forever, all that was
past, and future, and not here. And in a white rose
there were not to be found any secrets, since in its unfolding
there was no centre, nor in its decay. Only the random petals fallen.
 
In the yellow time of poppies when the fields were ablaze
those invisible pollens rained around us.
The days held us lightlocked in golden surrender
and all night long the night shot stars.
When my chest unconstricted at last, did yours?
 
The real issue, of course, was this: atomically, energetically,
everything was wave function. And a wave continues forever into space,
the wavelength never alters, only the intensity lessens, so
in the worst cosmic way everything is connected by vibrations.
And this, as even a dog would know, is no consolation.
 
Ah but the dogs will save us all in the end & even the planet.
Not the superdogs but the household friendlies, always
eager to please, hysterically fond, incessant, carrying in the very
wagging of their tales an unbounded love not even
therapists could imagine; their forgiveness unhinges us.
 
We were reduced to this: this day and night,
primary gold and indigo, the binary profusion
of distances guessed at, heat and cold, colours
logged in the retina and lodged in the spine;
we were dogs who knew the infinite is now,
 
that celandine was buttercup, that buttercup was marigold.
The dog star marked the dog days and the wild rose
was dog rose. The crow’s-foot was wild hyacinth.
By day the correspondences were clear.
I walked across the whin land. Speedwell bluer than sky.
 
A practised ear could hear, between two breaths,
deep space wherein the mind collects itself.
Words foundered and cracked. Nearly
never bulled the cow. A shining isomorphousness
rang out. The roussignol sang all night.
 
All colours were shuffled endlessly but never lost.
A practised ear could hear, between two breaths,
the secret blackness of the snow
come flooding in. On summer’s lawns
the ice-melt sprayed its figure-eights from sprinklers.
 
And everything stopped working, second time around,
as if it had never happened before. Fans
moved the corpses of fireflies through the rooms,
supplicant, pathetic, pleading in brittle postures.
Everything was magnified by their bug-eyed deaths.
 
We became solemn in that profusion
of dying. Cane toads fattened the asphalt
in the mist and the rain; our headlights caught them
tensed as if listening: they were waiting,
mute, for the imbecility of eternity.
 
The clocks merely pulsed, or rather the days.
Like shotgun spray on the weatherboard, sleep
scattered itself through the blurred heat
and secreted itself in the nooks of delirium.
Sometimes the magpies would wake us, or the phone,
 
mid-afternoon. And we needed nothing, not even hope,
being no different from the dragonflies,
or the cows in their despair. It appeared we lived
on sunlight and chocolate bars. You blossomed
so from not ever reading the newspapers.
 
Things came and went—the years and all the airports.
I was a shade scattering my shade seed
liberally to the winds and weathervanes.
There was not enough absence to go round.
I heard voices, stabat mater, in the whine of jets
 
and in air vents and headphones a stream
trilling over rocks. On tarmacs and in transit
I saw your lips, your nakedness, the trees,
that dappled light. I dreamt of orchards.
The preciseness of the world came flooding in.