To Forget Me

Now when I have thrust my body

from me far as doubt is, almost far

as death who recently thrived in me,

who, hands throbbing with fulfilment,

warmed in the lesson I nearly learned,

when I have refused and choked

the voices staunch in me, have spurned

them, racing through my hands like gifts,

like water clearest over pebbles lifted

as they lift, a chortle as of sunlight

in the folds filling the body,

now when I plant me, a surly rock

against me, mouth locked that no voices,

inside or out, be heard, and birds

like the morning light but scorings

T. WBISS

over and under of the dark,

and when I have turned my back on me,

have sought the starkest future that must

in every way forget me, I yearning to be

cleansed of me, even to shadow, shade,

least murmur in me of the memory

of my name and time, still the world

is practising its splendor of pleasures,

more plentiful than ever for my absence:

as though this place had nobody to say

them nay, presences stride: birds

clamber through, an open top azure:

spices speak like genius on the emptied

mouth. And when you stoop, the massy-

murmured administerings of evening,

its stirring silks, a precision

on the lips, kiss ransacks every corner

of my body where I have not been. I am

flooded to that realm the lightnings

coil, I inmost far out in the world.