By Richard Mather
I
I am bright Apollo,
Dreamer of lines and surfaces,
Of clean and precise things,
Of machine, statue, and structure,
Bone-hard and metal-dry.
Your eye, see, glides
Across the polish
Of stone that is my body.
I have seen the gorgon
Subsisting
In the wide womb
Of the underworld,
That no-place of blood, catarrh and faeces,
Of bodies
Flailing and flapping in dark water.
My body is stone.
My thoughts are stiff as air in winter.
II
All flesh is gross,
The bulge of skin beneath the cloth,
The nipple gazing at the eye,
The painted toenail in the shoe,
A spread of fingers inside the glove.
The child’s snot and cry,
The plastic bag in the gutter,
The dry papery leaves,
The wind that pushes you
This way and that.
III
I came, through sea waves, misty-brained,
My love songs crumbling to shadows,
And I was halved to something
Less than human. How could I grow
Into something more than what I had become?
Impossible now, the diminishing returns
Of what was given me at birth.
Smaller than a baby now, more of a creature
Belonging to the forests, of stumps
And traps and blood, the day-moon
Hanging over me like a sad reminder.
I was lost, having become lost, and unable
To return to where I started, which
Was no-place at all.
I cannot hold to my visible shape:
the self’s disunity makes me formless,
mercurial.
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