The Last Rebirth
To fix attention on the dead
and not let us wander off
a clamp shuts in the chest.
Lights grow faint and more numerous.
There’s only the looking in.
Your palm
beneath the outer map of skin
has an old wound badly sewn up
with ordinary white thread
healed in an ugly welt
that opens while you look.
Inside the hand, a host
the small image of a man
wrapped in membrane like a toy
that’s been buried in the earth.
You’ve been tending him for years
within your body
loving the bare backs of women
placing your right hand in cold streams
for him, and now you know why.
What world you’ve known, the sky itself
is densely rooted and nerved
here in this icon
your one true pregnancy
still on the bloodvine like a melon
perfecting its stripes
with seeds and memory.
The dead are way ahead of us, thank God,
at the clean wooden tables by the waterfall
in the permanent mist
talking however they do
without using metaphor.
Left behind we meditate on something,
on a pair of pliers
changing the bite, open and shut.
Wind ruffles a quilt
slowly through a week of weather.
A crowd with all ages dancing, hands in the air
come to the presence of trees where each
inside himself rejoices
like fish in shallow rapids
or any other sign
say the edge of a door
or a man running down a flight of steps
signs the last rebirth
hasn’t yet begun.
