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Scarcely I slept, restless and fitful / Tossed ashore by oneiric tides / Waking, walking, sand in my hair / Blood shivering in the dark

I have held my heart in my hands / Tested its sustenance, useless and cold / Crouching among the circle of stones / Flickering stars merely

pinpricks of regret

Dreaming — the stark and sunlit threshold/Over and over — slipping closer to the door

I transmute delirium to substance / Dripping with sweat, cursed and feeble / I cannot recall the form of a tiger / The fragrance of wood,

the slickness of deceit

I reject, I deny, I lament that which I create / Curling inward, cowering from light/Lurching from idyll again into ruination

I drag my raft by night to the current’s edge/Shoreline strewn with glass, like fistfuls of teeth / Cast upon wine-dark seas of time/Over the scuttling things that wreathe the innards of the earth

Behold the sum of man, behold the price of rest / One forbidden sight, one familiar sin / To soar into the sun, to crush that which you hold

most dear

I have felt its breath in my sleeping mouth / A bitter taste I cannot coax or reproduce / Now, dragged into the moaning daylight / I feel it slip forever from my trembling hands

For each attempt to produce a form in perfect structure / The more distended and grotesque my progeny / I resign myself to slump at last into the pyre / But with relief, with humility, with terror I am unharmed

Steady my hand, light of the morning / Denuder of self, destroyer of all, deposer of kings, diminisher of man.