The first morning of cancer he awoke
And went with his eyes half all the way
From their grave room, as it wore in two.
All night in the dream of his mouth he had held
His life, by the tongue drawn down
To the sand brim, where the hourglass hears the whirlwind from
its toe
Sing itself clear of the ground.
Upward of the bed, he passed, again,
The sense of floating brightly in a maze.
All two honest shapes
Of light, either one invisible, he lay there face
to-face, in both the shadow’s men: the Fallen,
And the Risen-from-the-Sun.
In the smell of bread-making flames he kept hearing,
“The thing that you are you have done.”
Almost awake, he had the serpent’s
Measure, of lying long, along
Each felled position of his life
In Light, prodigious casting of a center.
Halfway through the sun, he knew.
He closed his eyes, and suddenly he was one
Of an army of panting men.
His fear passed off, intact. Abandoned, sustained,
A loose chair came and rode
Partly down under his clothes. His shoes on the floor
In a kind of mooring swayed, by their weight slowly signed,
again.
To where he was, he had come, his slight hair folded
Wrong, from the very beginning, about his naked brain.
He laid the sheet aside, and softly entered his hand, and with it fell
Upon his chest, spellbound with what it was doing.
As it drew air, he seemed to dip inside, at once,
All of the miles of breath upon the earth.
He thought what he would say.
All night he had heard the bed
About him, in the fluttering of a bush, be used
And flaked away, and on the saved-up word
To be said to his son out of sleep, had felt his lungs
The covering of his voices with a sack, and slept again
Headlong into a sound.
And now he looked, and the child was gone
He had called, and a posture with jackstrawed hair
Fled outward, not gaining, through sleep.
Something, a pain, came out of him
And was shimmering by the inch and mile, at once.
Across his temperate skin, the child’s flesh deeply blew,
An uncorrected gentleness of air.
Through this he stepped, and turned,
And in the window was immersed.
Alone above the bed, he saw his son
Taken by leagues of sunlight from behind.
Much like his earlier fear, the pain passed off.
Slowly he filled with the blue hulk of his eyes
Gazing from love. It could not, then, be other.
He looked, out past himself and behind.
The wet crept up to the house, and the tended grass
Went on and under,
Beyond. Moment after moment out of air
His youth arrived. He began to dance in his blood.
The sun came over him, in a stroke of life.
His guts were burring with hunger.
His lawn on the very wings
Of Possession beat, and raised him, where he swayed
With the world’s good pulse: the wings of a bird
In flight, which must shut
The bird each instant from falling.
His hair dumped over his forehead, he dumped it more,
And took off his shirt, and sat in the little of wind.
The chapped skin on his back stretched close
And bloomed like a great hedge in the light.
The cancer rose in his brain, and yet therein
Made no dramatic stand upon an image.
A fathomless shawl on his back, he stooped
And took a double handful of the room
Out of the slept-in air. He dispersed the ball of his hands,
Having learned not a thing, but happiness,
Over again. Through the crawl of bloom on his back,
Slowly his soul from its watchful night came in,
Still lapping the bricks of the house. Anew, and doubly, he looked
down
Where the lives of his wife and son streamed on,
Unlimited, into their crimson lids.
A stirring stopped. Nothing before
He moved had moved. A shell somewhere broke water:
An armored slug, a king-crab in a wig,
A turtle sparkling mossily from its back,
In its twilight of weight gone mad.
He was found in the window, and the universe struck like flint
Unreasonable eyes of prey.
About him in his yard, each paid-for rock
Shortened its shade, pulled on it like a scab.
Uneasily, he let his breath curve out around
The end of the sun, in his room,
The whole God, in a mask like a green-house, behind him.
A soundless cry went up and stood
In amazement between the beds, as if it felt the sun
Flattened on stone, of moonlight, then
Come back. He remembered he had shone himself all night
Into a helpless hanging-there of boughs.
He drowsed, and tried again. Along his arms
Some hidden branches came afloat. He kicked and pled.
They took him from the tree, and closed his sleeping body in th:
hill
Of light. He screamed in all his face
And it was singing from the rocks.
The air blew hard, and was a fire of dust
On all the roads. The bone of blindness turned
Among his brows, until it struck the light. The mountain moved.
He shrilled, and brought a man, his size, of sweat,
Superb, from the flight of the sun.
Beyond all light, his shadow shed
Through all of him to the wall. His son said,
“I will help.” He heard. He set himself to call,
But broke. A thing, that instant, had grown
In the way a child, being lost in another’s house,
Will fall to its knees and creep.
Astonished, the son rose up.
A knitted shape the size of two great ironing-boards, was pulled
To feathers on his back.
Vibrant as the haze of a propeller, from his miraculous head, one
eye
Opened, and was followed by the moon’s. In his light, inside the
light
Of the first morning, he stood by the stone, and could hear,
Beyond, the death from the nearest of flesh,
In its basket of hands, nailing one
To another, and deadly, self,
Up and down and across from within.
Upon him, all his waking came to be
Where he strove with the starry stone,
His milled nails torn to mica by the weight,
And moving the rock not an inch.
Half dead from imagined screaming, he yelled out wide once
more,
“And they found the stone rolled away.”
Yet when the child arose
Beside the window’s cave, the Being
Dropped from his breast, from sleep, into the sun
Wearing the soldier’s dreaming mail,
The angel wept, as the child remembered
His father. For a moment the man saw brightly
Dilated through stone, the cross, an olive-tree,
Close with the Foe-within-Light, to ruin him into leaf.
From the boy he was
The distance where the soul appears, and all their eyes
Ablaze with intelligence, their face the face the horseman feels
Ascend to his, from the sprinting horse.
The boy came to him, and the cancer found
Life, in the motion of a woman unbinding
Her hair all the way to the bone.
It billowed about them like seaweed, and the man
Descended. God gave him up,
And smiled across his breastbone, in the light:
On his, like a crown, the candle
dancing head of unconsciousness placed. It was all in the fear
Of waking, returned in full, immense as the angel’s
Alone in the sun, first watching the silent earth
From fire and shadow be made. There, he had come to be,
Unmystical, Love’s pure bare Looking-On,
Not to notice, on pain of expulsion, who
In the world it was, the child gripped,
Trembling, by one hard healthy foot.
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