The name of a fact: at home in that leafy world
chewed on by moths that look like leaves, like bark,
like owls, like death’s heads; there, by eating flowers
and stones with eyes, in that zoo of second looks,
there is a spider, phrynarachne d.,
to whom a million or a billion years
in the humorless long gut of all the wood
have taught the art of mimicking-a bird turd.
“It is on a leaf,” writes Crompton, “that she weaves
an irregular round blotch, and, at the bottom,
a separate blob in faithful imitation
of the more liquid portion. She then squats
herself in the center, and (being unevenly marked
in black and white), supplies with her own body
the missing last perfection, i.e., the darker
more solid central portion of the excreta.”
Must I defend my prayers? I dream the world
at ease in its long miracle. I ponder the egg,
like a pin head in silk spit, invisibly stored
with the billion years of its learning. Have angels
more art than this? I read the rooty palm
of God for the great scarred Life Line. If you
will be more proper than real, that is your
death. I think life will do anything for a living.
And that hungers are all one. So Forbes reports
that seeing a butterfly once poised on a dropping
he took it to be feasting, but came closer
and saw it was being feasted on. Still fluttering,
it worked its woolen breast for phrynarachne,
pumping her full. So once I saw a mantis
eating a grub while being himself eaten
by a copper beetle. So I believe the world
in its own act and accomplishment. I think
what feeds is food. And dream it in mosaic
for a Church of the First Passion: an ochre sea
and a life-line of blue fishes, the tail of each
chained into the mouth behind it. Thus, an emblem
of our indivisible three natures in one:
the food, the feeder, and the condition of being
in the perpetual waver of the sea.
I believe the world to praise it. I believe
the act in its own occurence. As the dead
are hats and pants in aspic, as the red
bomb of the living heart ticks against time,
as the eye of all water opens and closes, changing
all that it has looked at-I believe
if there is an inch or the underside of an inch
for a life to grow on, a life will grow there;
if there are kisses, flies will lay their eggs
in the spent sleep of lovers; if there is time,
it will be long enough. And through all time,
the hand that strokes my darling slips to bone
like peeling off a glove; my body eats me
under the nose of God and Father and Mother.
I speak from thickets and from nebulae:
till their damnation feed them, all men starve.
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