Pericles

What are my friends? Mouths, not eyes for

Bitterest underflesh of the farewell.

I was a man and suffered like a girl.

I spoke underneath to where the lights are

Pretty, pretty, pretty whence they came to tell

One God gets another. My friends are

Mouths for God, tearing me. In such a world

Broken only daughter opens to splendor.

My first thought was that dying is a deep well

Into the image of death, a many of one girl.

Later it meant to smile with no face, where

Mirrors are mouths. Cupid and Psyche wore

Blindfolds made of glass, which explains why girls

Get to heaven early mornings Adam fell.

Gods after gods we go. Still later,

Friends shouldered high mountains to the lee shore.

Gashed, and the gash a fountain of waters,

The landscape defames a single flower:

Amaranth. Magic hides an island world

Of boys and one daughter. I buried a pearl

In God’s eye. And yet He sees her,

Defames her, considers His time well

Spent imagining a continent of flowers

Whose final climate is a broken girl.

Bells of a Cretan woman in labor

Hurled from a tower, flesh realer

Than the ground she somehow upwards curled

Into the bloom of her groin where bells

Are bees. I am an old man with a new beard.

I am the offspring of my child sprung from hell.

Shipwreck makes peninsular metaphor

Out of my hatred, her rape, and one bell tower.

Confusion suicides the poems, heaven I heard

Where the juice runs from stone-struck flowers.

At the end of the world I must use proper

Violence. Nothing is more true to tell.

Tell the taut-strung higher calendars

I’ve a margent in mind and new words

Hope to say, catastrophe to hear,

Old confederates and inwood apples

Where apples never shone. Also tell

Of mountains shouldered underneath one flower

Called amaranth. They tired of the world

Who made the world this way. God never

Did, never will. If you were to call

From the bottom of the ocean, the words,

Every one to me a living daughter,

Would shout wild mercy as never was before.