"The Third Ceremony."
Emmanuel.
Child, it is your water friend.
I carry a gift such as will be needed in your new art.
Touch.
Lord, thank you.
I will handle it with care.
Forth from a pool of dancing blues and greens with nothing
in his hands, Emmanuel leans to stroke the dazzled infant's
brow and lips, heart, limbs, and sex with glistening fingertips.
Oh floating, puny thing, gaily begin exploring.
Let fingers flow about, between, below head, neck, and arms
and these new, knobbly knees find each child.
No.
I will.
I do, Lord.
And?
Make sense of them.
See?
The taste of revenge.
Feel your poor mother give a start.
She cries.
On the morrow you will hear that cry.
Tom, it's moved.
Tom, I am near my time.
Lord, how gratefully I float in this your world and not yet
hear those two near cries.
Forgive.
Accept the first tears of these swimming eyes.
Oh touching, touching.
Were not feelings banned I'd call this gift most feeling
of its kind.
Child, you have passed the halfway mark.
Soon daylight, noise, the slap will wrench you
from your liquid dark.
Think on us, child, in your sleep.
Clutch the plump breast, purse the little lip,
tasting the milk of life, then soon put hands
to keys and magic us with tune.
Now blessings on you three.
Go well, dear babe.
We dwell in thee.
Emmanuel goes.
The thin unearthly glaze has spread across the portrait.
Here a nose, there an ear can be made out.
The room dissolves about us.
Robert?
But he stays.
Sirs, he called through door.
Uni, tell them to come early and speak.
Tomorrow.
Yes, for on the final day we say goodbye.
Oh sirs, oh sirs.
Uni, there will be toys, a little horse,
horsey his first word.
Hush, he won't forget.
But Uni is gone elsewhere with his grief.
Next day, his feelings mastered.
Sirs, he asked me, Uni, what do you see?
I saw a very small man still with Mr. R's kind eyes
but a crutch and a flute.
I told him.
Uni, just as I thought, just so.
He's here.
Oh, Mr. Robert, who will boost you upon my back?
Uni, no more rides for us, dear creature.
How you've lifted my heart, but now farewell.
Tomorrow the lads will find our nursery doors
swinging on its hinges and your friend
Robert, a red defensive wrinkled thing
awaiting the breath of life.
No tears in those great faithful eyes and on your rump
with my imagined flute and affectionate thump.
Uni, away.
Oh, Robert.
And no tears in our small, faithless ones?
Well, faithless?
No, no.
We believe.
We do.
And so must I.
Will it be taken from you now, that ingrained callus
of the self?
Oh, all skinned off before another tiny Marsyas can stand
up to Apollo, flute in hand, must
come the terrifying interval in which pure facelessness
attempts to smile.
This is still you, though?
But inside the soft walnut shell the meat
formed these long months is grinding out
a new tune from its grooves.
A tune that, heard, makes you inaudible?
Somewhere no doubt in ancient '78
preserves the scratchy tone of that late great amateur tenor
me.
And while Earth's waiting for its new music,
we'll replay the old to our heart's content.
DJ, will we be told your name?
JM, have you been told it?
You've struck a note.
There's rustling in the wings.
We've time left only for last words.
What would it be?
Shall we defy them?
Turn the clock back?
It's everything one loathes about the dance.
Sentence completed here in operatic unison,
we looked round, they were, and you, too.
DJ, did you hear, JM?
A kindred soul.
You warmed my heart, dear ones, from start
to this, the not so bitter end.
Quick, a caress on either elder's brow.
I'm tip top on the children's slide.
Now.