I thought you must have been cold on that day
Since your broad paper umbrella
Which held off the rain,
Like a dock leaf above a fluttered-still moth
With delicate white wings,
Could not hold out the wind.
It was not a room,
With a fire in the corner,
Nor was it a palanquin
Carried by footmen,
Like a house torn by war it lacked walls.
Surely you are brave, to stand in the open,
In only a t-shirt,
Like an orphan leaving the home
In which his parents died
For the great, wide wet world.
_
You gave me a loaf of bread,
Like a covenant,
And as I broke it in half
And shared it with my dog,
I felt myself taken from the spirit world,
The world of memories in which I had wandered,
A world akin to death, or the brink of it.
The cold air and the heaviness in my stomach
Were substituted for the fragments of dreams:
My parents lying still,
The startled eyes of the soldiers.
_
You looked then not like an angel,
Not like a paper-winged prophet
Of justice and pain,
But like a child,
And there was the moon in your smile.
_
This gray and dripping country,
With stone instead of life,
Extends to the horizon-less clouds,
A scarred and empty plane
Upon which lost souls drift
Like the Netherworld.
We smiled blindly at the sun and were confused
When it disappeared as quickly as the heartbeat of my dog,
Caught in the crossfire.
Perhaps we fear that impoverished orphans, born to the Void,
Are bound to return to it.
That there is nowhere to go but the Void.
That we will die, too, in the Void.
_
There are no mushrooms in this country,
Nor any growing thing, it seems,
But the rain has carved the rocks into arches,
And caves, like domed soapstone fungi.
But even we would not then have thought that those shapes would become a cloud,
Hanging lazily, dazedly,
Over the greatest city
In the greatest country
Of the world.
The laughing blond children, with food in their bellies,
Are shown the underside of the Netherworld.
All glory, I know, is ephemeral.
I should have known, when I accepted the covenant of the bread,
That only your pain-shadowed eyes and origami flowers
Would be left to watch the ugly, hating spider-demons crawl
From the crevices
Of this new abyss.