Huddled on the floor, the afterbirth

Was already offal.

There was the lotus-eater’s whole island

Dragged out by its roots, into the light,

And flopped onto blood-soaked newsprint – a tangled

Puddle of dawn reds and evening purples,

To be rubbished. You were laughing and weeping

Into the glare. A tear-splitting dazzle

Like the noon sun finally stared at

Had burst into the bedroom when the Gorgon

Arrived and ripped her face off

And threw it to the floor. Such a shocking

Beauty born. I saw it flash up

That sunburned German with all his strength

Slamming the sea-tripes of the octopus

Hard down onto our honeymoon quay –

In the blue-blackish glare

Of my sunstroke.

                                 You were weeping

Your biggest, purest joy. The placenta

Already meaningless, asphyxiated.

Your eyes dazzling tears as I thought

No other brown eyes could, ever,

As you lifted the dazzler. I eased

The heavy, fallen Eden into a bowl

Of ovenproof glass. A bowl with a meaning

All to itself – a hare crouching

In its claret – the curled-up, chopped-up corpse

That weeks before I had jugged in it. I felt

Like somebody’s shadow on a cave wall.

A figure with a dog’s head

On a tomb wall in Egypt. You watched me

From your bed, through the window,

As I buried the bowlful of afterbirth

In a motherly hump of ancient Britain,

Under the elms. You would eat no more hare

Jugged in the wine of its own blood

Out of that bowl. The hare nesting in it

Had opened its eyes. As if some night,

Maybe with a thick snow falling softly,

It might come hobbling down from under the elms

Into our yard, crying: ‘Mother! Mother!

They are going to eat me.’

                                               Or bob up,

Dodging ahead, a witchy familiar, sent

To lock error beyond repair when it

Died silent, a black jolt,

Under my offside rear wheel

On the dawn A 30. You heard nothing.

But it bled out of my pen. And re-formed

On my page. The hieroglyph of the hare.

You picked it up, curious.

And it screamed in your ear like a telephone –

The moon-eyed, ripped-up flower of it screamed.

Disembowelled, a stunned mask,

Unstoppably, like a burst artery,

The hare in the bowl screamed –