"After the Funeral"
A white cat has come to sit on the back side of slaughter,
To sit on a white bull bearing a necklace of pomegranates.
The cat has come not as any witness to a crucifixion
Or a coronation, not as Angel or symbol of some comfort
Creature, some benign break in the dying,
But as human wish, as distraction from suffering.
My human wish: to keep my father's schizophrenia
In his casket, to keep that below the earth, one
from another,
Now and forever.
In season and out.
From mountain to mountain.
In the trees and after.
Amen.
Everything has come back to prayer, sitting in that delay,
'Harrowing the fixities', my father in me, and my clock,
My hoof, my feather, and the sprawling
Armature and stars of I am.
Lord am I worthy?
Have I devotion?
What body built?
Of flood, of cancer,
Of winter, of woman--Lord,
I pray as I've been taught--to keep nothing
From my tongue, its palm, its golden mind
So it bees and be's with whatever it
be's--rose, rain--Lord,
Even her, even her who rises from his bed,
The naked two-ness of her filling the room such that she
becomes the room--
Lord, am I ready?
How shall I bear the coming madness if it is to come?
What disaster will I deliver to my daughter?
My human wish: distraction: a white cat,
Balanced on the back side of a bull, slaughter
Far off, this delay, Lord this delay I offer,
Because I own neither houses nor land, have not hundreds heads
Of cattle or of State grazing on grain in a golden-green field.
Keep this coming distant, this sickness underground,
And if Lord I am, to bear madness,
Become the father who scratches the raw earth
With his hoof and snout, plowing the field
As ox or ass because the mind says go, go
Into the pasture not as ox or as ass but go, Ox,
Go, Ass, then Lord, let me into the field, but make,
Lord, Diviner of the Snowflake and master of fragments,
A light, a golden light in the tree,
And there have my daughter stare at its working
The darkness in the green, in the leaves and red blooms,
While I, behind her, lick the tines of a fence
And leap in the dust in front of a white cat
That has become my master, that I follow
Out to a white bull bearing a necklace of pomegranates.