I had always thought of birth
As a catastrophe:
Forced from the world of constant warmth and water
To the harsh scrubbed air of Planet Gravity.
Unhooked from the umbilical, displaced
From immortal complacency
To the slaughterhouse of light.
Jumbled by shapes, lost
In the gesticulating air.
Severed from the reference frame,
Bewildered, baffled,
Screaming at fluorescents.
And this birth, yes,
Was like that,
Only harder, bloodier, more terrifying
Than the extremes of my imagination.

Morning comes; graves awaken
As chemical lids ajar.
Steam slinks from the kettle
Whose steel gargoyles my face
In warped curves and bone-shifts,
And the frantic cat thrub-dubs my knees
As red meat sinks by my hand to her level
By logistics beyond her mentality.
The clock counts time,
Radium moon-face,
A skull in the abstract,
Steel as statistic.
But I sink all in steam-flow;
Water boils the leaves around —
Pot-bellied warm tea,
White lava of sunlight.
And the cat
Purrs.

The holiday people camp in softdrink shade;
The white sun dances in the brown tea
In the hot cup, in the hot day
Where the attenuated birdsong shrills
Into untenable heights soprano
And the sun splits as the liquid jars
As a door slams —
Open.
Let time suspend the execution of the hour
For this one moment here in sunshaft,
Here cool wind, beyond our Kafka country, beyond
Our torn-wallpaper lives, beyond the city
Where the world outruns its cliches,
Green verdant and blue ultramarine —
I attempt a free translation of birdsong.

Delirium's downpour
Swamps the tides of evening.
Gin sets lips to champagne.
Night sweats; pearls of sweat
Squat in armpit and crotch.
Breathing labors.
The mosquito makes his rounds,
Stirring the air with unease.
On the wall,
Calvin, the family founder,
Peers out of the Victorian permafrost.
Wood
Swells with the weather;
A tropical disease
Hollows the crucifix.
On the air, the smell of wet earth,
Breadfruit and mango,
The sweet rot of the fertile sun.
The rain thunders; under cover,
Flesh blends to one race of night
In a single bed.

The ground is a tract of infection.
The sun streams with X-rays,
And a tumour floats in the orange juice.
Cancer grips in the bowels.
They say it's only hypochondria,
But the scalpel bites
Without the benediction of anaesthetic.
The toothpick in the olive
Sharpens to a needle. The spine
Jars on the pavement;
The knees corrode in the bath-water.
Mite and virus
Spin in the sunshaft's dust.
The thick cream of eclair
Curdles in the chambers of the heart.
And always the inevitable night
Smothers the last light,
Stinking of ether and chloroform.