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Fucking I: I will come to you with a candle burning

Ouvrez-moi cette porte où je frappe en pleurant.
…………—Apollinaire
Open this door where I knock weeping.

I

I will come to you with a candle burning
light a stick of incense
comb and braid your hair with sparrows’ feathers
gathered from the sidewalk
cinnamon, black-tinged, white with edges.
Sometimes it’s important not to see things as they are.
Who needs the certainty or the daylight?
When evening brings its shadows, let them grow
like mascara you smear on my eyelids
till they’re covered and I’m different.
When night’s fallen, hidden flesh
flesh is more than flesh is—
Let’s vanish there in kisses!

Before we wake and our voices
dissolve into larger noises
traffic jams and employments
where we mostly please our bosses
sparrows wake up high in cornices
along the marble ledges
where they’ve spent the night protected
in long rows
like crowns of silence sleeping
surrounding empty offices and unlit rooms.

They’ve no alarms, just start up
in the still dark sky, the sparrows
flying down to hedges
slipping from the branches
staying there suspended
unbending their heads out of their wings
shake-shaking off the dew to bring
my ear note at a time a song.
“Wake, wake,” they sing, “it’s dawn.”


The illustrations above are from Barney IV, 1984, Jack Skelly, editor, Stephen Spera, illustrator.

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