Prophecy (Judgment Day)
Where there is grass, sin. All flesh
and fat fish snapping in the pool.
Here I come to lull my head
and wallow waist-deep
in the sweet mirror of myself
swimming upward at me—
eyes the sparrows
cutting red berries in the air
to peel off the skull. Red fists.
Have they music? Timbre?
Cadence? Candor?
She sits. Sits with her hands on her knees—
viola, violence, violate.
Sways faithfully, her eyes shut to water,
the mirror-green miracle.
The woman is a forty-foot yacht
and the same amount of money.
Her violet cocktail glass
unshattered in the red hour.
When she is dying
she goes to work in a shiny black car.
I am working toward the dying
like a cat struggling out of the bag—
toward the rhapsody of my body,
the billowing of a laundry-line
burial, on broadcast news, a cable
to unwilling memory.
I mistress the word
someone called poet. Someone called
mama. Mind her manners.
Watch me & her
in the pool, only— me.
Open my eyes, Tiresias,
we open-mouthed prophet,
we glassy-eyed and weathered,
we the inviolate grass between graves,
again the sparrow, waking
to the violet past— sleeping
to the TV future— we worship,
O judge, until we dying
forget our cups
and dream of underwater light.