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Jon Silkin

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The Government's Comic

'The ghost of a flea' - Blake

If his mother bears
our child with
a torn brain, shall she die of it?
I’m the government’s comic, my brief
to make people laugh. My existence
is a thread of spittle in their mouths. Here’s
another version:

you are a droll beast, I its flea
an itch in the legislature,
my jaws out of proportion to my small eager body.
You shall be aware
of who I am

by my stipend. Where’s the shaping life in me
to form my laughter in your body
in its long, spiritual laughter?
Where the blood in me, to help me feel
your laughter? I bite
you between the balls, the smell
excuciating . . .
the sweet flummery of blood
my child will have of me. On the day the sun

in its storm of making whole appears,
vivid and huge, to shuck
the shrunk, fitted iron
that bands the earth - and reveal
union and boundary, and raise
what isn’t quick, until it is, I will make our child,
as they all are,
whole again. My Lord, my dear life, breathe

into me, until my limbs are astir
to lead him to a table, where the stamps — hinged
on sheets - I have saved for him
are no hobby - stare, stare away
like the Minds of Nations, in profile, strong
as the gaze, the eye’s
bearable magic. The bow!
God, bend your bow -
the underpinning of the eyes
the strong yielding bolt of the gaze -
and make the mind endure
all it has learned to fear.

Page(s) 15

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