These nights
following the children’s birth
you seek, dissatisfied,
within the nakedness you know so well,
my once unblemished beauty.
You are much repelled,
you say,
by a thickened body
and a belly criss-crossed with birthmarks;
my body, though, is unchanging
you say
today, hereafter and forevermore.
My voice, deep-buried
in the valley of silence,
mutters to itself:
True indeed,
your body is not like mine:
it proclaims itself,
it stands manifest.
Before this too,
your children, perhaps, were born
in many places, to many others;
you may be proud
you bear no traces of their birth.
And what must I do?
These birthmarks cannot be
repaired, any more than my own decline –
this body isn’t paper
to cut and paste together, or restore.
Nature has been
more perfidious to me
than even you;
but from you began
the first stage of my downfall.
More bizarre
than the early hours of night
is the hour past midnight
when dreams teem.
It is now, at this midnight hour
the tiger which sat quietly
within the picture on the wall
takes its place at my head
and stares
and stares.