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Alan Dunnett

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Identity

At night, I think I hear this child, a sound
Among the deep still dark and yellow windows.
No one stirs.  I used to think the cats
Were children, very small children crying insistently
And insane.  I saw the cats.  I heard them.

But now I hear a low, slow intermittent running
in my inner ear, molten, worm-like.  It is not sour wax.
My ear turns into a chrysalis whose shell bursts apart,
And in a floor of the air stands the voice of the child,
Heard only by me, impossible to prove!  If I make you see,
It becomes nothing, a conjuror’s coin disappearing between fingers.
A smudge of sweat at its last, greasy glistening in the palm.

You are here, beside me.  Welcome.  I am in your spell,
I am outside the spell.  You smile.  Whatever does that mean?
You believe I asked you here.  Perhaps.  One thing is clear,
There is a sound.  Look out.  Look down.  I am outside,
Like Nebuchadnezzar, ugly in excrement, head
Cocked.  My pupils are the orange edges of doors.
Yet you say, if you hear anything, it is only a cat.

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