VII
LITTLE SLEEP'S-HEAD
SPROUTING HAIR IN THE MOONLIGHT


1

You scream, waking from a nightmare.

When I sleepwalk 
into your room, and pick you up, 
and hold you up in the moonlight, you cling to me 
hard, 
as if clinging could save us. I think
you think 
I will never die, I think I exude 
to you the permanence of smoke or stars, 
even as 
my broken arms heal themselves around you.

2

I have heard you tell 
the sun, don't go down, I have stood by 
as you told the flower, don't grow old, 
don't die. Little Maud,

I would blow the flame out of your silver cup, 
I would suck the rot from your fingernail, 
I would brush your sprouting hair of the dying light, 
I would scrape the rust off your ivory bones, 
I would help death escape through the little ribs of your body, 
I would alchemize the ashes of your cradle back into wood, 
I would let nothing of you go, ever, 
until washerwomen 
feel the clothes fall asleep in their hands,
and hens scratch their spell across hatchet blades, 
and rats walk away from the cultures of the plague, 
and iron twists weapons toward the true north, 
and grease refuses to slide in the machinery of progress, 
and men feel as free on earth as fleas on the bodies of men, 
and lovers no longer whisper to the presence beside them in the 
	dark, O corpse-to-be . . .

And yet perhaps this is the reason you cry,
this the nightmare you wake screaming from: 
being forever 
in the pre-trembling of a house that falls.

3

In a restaurant once, everyone 
quietly eating, you clambered up 
on my lap: to all 
the mouthfuls rising toward 
all the mouths, at the top of your 
voice you cried 
your one word, caca! caca! caca! 
and each spoonful
stopped, a moment, in midair, in its withering 
steam.

Yes, 
you cling because 
I, like you, only sooner 
than you, will go down 
the path of vanished alphabets, 
the roadlessness 
to the other side of the darkness,

your arms 
like the shoes left behind,
like the adjectives in the halting speech
of old men, 
which once could call up the lost nouns.

4

And you yourself, 
some impossible Tuesday 
in the year Two Thousand and Nine, will walk out
among the black stones 
of the field, in the rain,

and the stones saying 
over their one word, ci-gicirct, ci-gicirct, ci-gicirct,

and the raindrops 
hitting you on the fontanel 
over and over, and you standing there 
unable to let them in.

5

If one day it happens 
you find yourself with someone you love 
in a cafe at one end 
of the Pont Mirabeau, at the zinc bar 
where white wine
stands in upward opening glasses,

and if you commit then, as we did, the error 
of thinking, 
one day all this will only be memory,

learn, 
as you stand 
at this end of the bridge which arcs,
from love, you think; into enduring love 
learn to reach deeper
into the sorrows 
to come-to touch 
the almost imaginary bones
under the face, to hear under the laughter 
the wind crying across the black stones. Kiss 
the mouth 
which tells you, here,
here is the world. This mouth. This laughter. These temple bones.

The still undanced cadence of vanishing.

6

In the light the moon 
sends back, I can see in your eyes

the hand that waved once 
in my father's eyes, a tiny kite 
wobbling far up in the twilight of his last look:

and the angel 
of all mortal things lets go the string.

7

Back you go, into your crib.

The last blackbird lights up his gold wings: farewell. 
Your eyes close inside your head, 
in sleep. Already 
in your dreams the hours begin to sing.

Little sleep's-head sprouting hair in the moonlight, 
when I come back 
we will go out together,


we will walk out together among 
the ten thousand things, 
each scratched too late with such knowledge, the wages 
of dying is love.