Heredity
Land animals demand a notion
of sea green.
Don’t go there.
Plentiful
as dead man's fingers,
answers ribbon out
among the angelfish –
Yourselves,
ankles caressed in rented sandals,
conceive a wish for alteration
floating clear and floating under,
rocked by gorgonia, fanned by dreadlocks,
concede a rush of alterations –
half creatures, half notions of sea green.
A doctor (praise his insight) diagnosed
fifty years' schizophrenia, released
a woman in her eighties from the names
holy, senile, sane.
They say,
Listen to your grandmothers.
Mine
put out milk for snakes;
died in public,
coming back to life
in her favourite god's arms;
sent her maid
to thrust a loaf over the gate
at the cast-off son
who (thinking himself a visitor)
came from the cruel asylum
on foot.
What happens to devotion such as hers
for the Triple-Lotus Lord, Whose Consort is
the Chandi, She Who Tears Apart Thought?
Both eyes closed, see a single eye
swim across the bridge of the nose.
How does it seem so?
Is this, then, under water? Utterly?
Unstrung
the body's code
lies between
parrot fish and rocks, not yet and never,
black water recrossed,
tight-fitting genes.
Page(s) 136-137
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