The Walk

After hard rain the eaves repeat their beads,

those trees exhale your doubt like mantled tapers,
drop after drop, like a child’s abacus
beads of cold sweat file from high-tension wires,

pray for us, pray for this house, borrow your neighbour’s 5
faith, pray for this brain that tires,
and lose faith in the great books it reads;
after a day spent prone, hemorrhaging poems,

each phrase peeled from the flesh in bandages,

arise, stroll on under a sky 10
sodden as kitchen laundry,

while the cats yawn behind their window frames,

lions in cages of their choice,
no further, though, than your last neighbour’s gates
figured with pearl. How terrible is your own 15

fidelity, O heart, O rose of iron!

When was your work more like a housemaid’s novel,
some drenched soap opera which gets
closer than yours to life? Only the pain,

the pain is real. Here’s your life’s end, 20

a clump of bamboos whose clenched
fist loosens its flowers, a track
that hisses through the rain-drenched

grove: abandon all, the work,

the pain of a short life. Startled, you move; 25
your house, a lion rising, paws you back.