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richcmather

Apollo

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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