I'm going to read a section from a long poem called The Book
of Nightmares, a section which itself is called "Little
Sleep's-head Sprouting Hair in the Moonlight,"
about going into a child, a little child who has waked up
in the middle of the night for whatever reasons little
children wake up and then sitting there until she falls
asleep again.
There's a word in here, a phrase, ci-gît,
old French meaning here lies used on tombstones.
"Little Sleep's-head Sprouting Hair in the Moonlight."
"When I sleepwalk into your room and pick you up and hold you up
in the moonlight, you cling to me
hard as though clinging could save us.
I think you think I will never die.
I think I exude to you the permanence of smoke
or stars even as my broken arms heal themselves around you.
I have heard you tell the sun don't go down
and I have stood by as you told the flower don't grow old,
don't die.
Little Maude.
I would blow the flame out of your silver cup.
I would suck the rot from your fingernail.
I would brush your sprouting hair of the dying light.
I would scrape the rust off your ivory bones.
I would help death escape through the little ribs
of your body.
I would let nothing of you go ever until the clothes fall
asleep in the washer woman's hands
and hence scratch their spell across hatchet blades
and grease refuses to slide in the machinery of progress
and iron twists weapons toward the true north.
Except perhaps this is the reason you cry.
This is the nightmare you wake crying from, being
forever in the pre-trembling of a house that falls.
In a restaurant, once everyone quietly eating,
you clambered up on my lap to all the mouthfuls
rising toward all the mouths.
At the top of your voice you cried your one word, caca,
caca, caca.
And each spoonful stopped a moment in mid-air
in its withering steam.
Yes, you cling because I like you
only sooner than you will go down
the roadlessness to the other side of the darkness.
Your arms like the shoes left behind,
like the adjectives in the halting
speech of very old people that used
to be able to call up the forgotten nouns.
And you yourself some impossible Tuesday in the year 2009,
will walk out among the stones of the field in the rain
and the stones saying over and over their one word ci-gît,
ci-gît, ci-gît, and the raindrops hitting you
on the fontanel over and over and you unable to let them in.
If one day it happens you find yourself
with somebody you love in a cafe at one end of the Pont Mirabeau
at the zinc bar where wine stands in upward opening
glasses and if you commit then as we did the error of thinking
one day, all this will only be memory,
learn to reach deeper into the sorrows to come,
to touch the almost imaginary bones under the face,
to hear under the laughter the wind crying across the stones.
Kiss the mouth that tells you here--
here is the world.
This mouth, this laughter, these temple bones,
the still condensed cadence of vanishing.
In the light the moon sends back I can see in your eyes
the hand that waved once in my father's eyes
a tiny kite wobbling far up in the twilight of his last look.
And the angel of all mortal things lets go the string.
Back you go into your crib.
The last blackbird lights up his gold wings.
Farewell, your eyes close inside your head in sleep.
Already in your dreams the hours begin to sing,
little sleep's-head sprouting hair in the moonlight.
When I come back, we will go out together.
We will walk out together among the 10,000 things
each scratched in time with such knowledge.
The wages of dying is love."