THE MYTH OF THE OTHER
THE MYTH OF THE OTHER
I open a foreign myth like a window cut into my temple,
for the gods of my own house smell of fact, of cold stone,
and the symbol, when I do not possess it, walks in my blood like a lamp
carried by a child through the attic, and the attic is my own flesh —
read the others; only then do you hear yourself speaking.
Half the world chews metaphor like bread
and calls it the bone of truth; the rest spit it out as a lie,
and so the sky is split into two accountants' ledgers,
some believing with an abacus in hand, others denying with a ruler,
while the poem, a snail without a shell, passes between them unseen.
My devil is a god I never called by name,
a pyre I carried down to the cellar and sealed with a lid of clay,
and now it ferments in the dark and splits the staves of the night;
everything I refuse to inhabit becomes a tenant with fangs,
everything I push behind me grows on my back, a wing with claws.
Eternity is not tomorrow, nor snow that lasts for years,
it is the dimension right here, the one that thought cuts through,
it is the tea steaming, it is the moment with a scalded lip,
and if I do not catch it in the kitchen with the flies and the rain,
I will not catch it in any paradise with a doorman and a register.
The apocalypse is not a blaze but the mist that lifts
from your neighbor's face and shows him suddenly holy,
it is the end of the one road, of the padlock set on truth,
and the kingdom is the moment you see your enemy shining
like a glass of water held up in a June window.
They told me: at the edge of life you will come to a chasm. Jump.
It is not as wide as fear believes; the old skin
has to be shed, or else it rots on you —
hell is the dried-out life, the snake that refuses its own tail;
and still, torn into being, I whisper "Ah" — and it is spectacular.
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