In the myth of your first death our deity
Was yourself resurrected.
Yourself reborn. The holy one.
Day in day out that was our worship –
Tending the white birth-bed of your rebirth,
The unforthcoming delivery, the all-but-born,
The ought-by-now-to-be-born.
We were patient.
The gruelling prolongueur of your labour-pangs
Gave our dedication altitude.
What would you be – begotten
By that savage act of yours committed
On your body, battering your face to the concrete,
Leaving yourself for dead
(And hoping you were dead) for three days?
We feared
Our new birth might be damaged,
Injured in that death-struggle conception.
Our hope was also dread. The dolorous
Agony you performed was also happy:
The part of your own mother. I was midwife.
And the daily busyness of life
Was no more than more towels, kettles
Of hot water, then the rubber mask
Of anaesthetic that had no gas in it,
The placebo you kept grabbing for,
Gulping it like cocaine.
What was trying to come frightened you.
You had no idea what it might be –
Yet it was the only thing you wanted.
Night after night, weeks, months, years
I bowed there, as if over a page,
Coaxing it to happen,
Laying my ear to our unborn and its heartbeat,
Assuaging your fears. Massaging
Your cramps into sleep with hypnosis
And whispering to the star
That would soon fall into our straw –
Till suddenly the waters
Broke and I was dissolved.
Much as I protested and resisted
I was engulfed
In a flood, a dam-burst thunder
Of new myth.
In the warp of pouring glair,
Me bowled under it, I glimpsed
Your labour cries refracted, modulating –
Just as in a film – not to the cries
Of the newborn in her creams and perfumes,
Not to the wauling of joy,
But to the screams
Of the mourner
Just after death far-off in prehistory.
After death and outside our time.
The now of it
A scream stuck in a groove – unstoppable.
And you had been delivered of yourself
In flames. Our newborn
Was your own self in flames.
And the tongues of those flames were your tongues.
I had delivered an explosion
Of screams that were flames.
‘What are these flames?’ was all I managed to say,
Running with my midwife’s hands
Not to wash them, only to extinguish
The screeching flames that fed on them and dripped from them.
I could not escape the torching gusher.
You were a child-bride
On a pyre.
Your flames fed on rage, on love
And on your cries for help.
Tears were a raw fuel.
And I was your husband
Performing the part of your father
In our new myth –
Both of us drenched in a petroleum
Of ancient American sunlight,
Both of us consumed
By the old child in the new birth –
Not the new babe of light but the old
Babe of dark flames and screams
That sucked the oxygen out of both of us.