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.