In the antiseptic Eden,
your small light burns:
a green dot
that carried you
across two continents,
from coal-mining village,
cricket for the county,
and Oxford ribbons,
to picturesque America,
where life is a bonfire
and a man’s heart
does not attack him.
For fourteen years
I’ve huddled close
to that heart
strangers decode
by echo-scan
and oscilloscope.
The smocked magicians
of rhythm
turn level eyes
to your pounding
electricity.
Midnight.
All our totemic animals
are asleep:
the kangaroos,
the panther,
the harvest mouse,
the camel,
the prairie dogs,
the lion:
of our animal love.
The doctors, your mother,
and your poet all sleep.
Only your heart
lies awake.
With ink and a stylus
it scratches out
a story,
speaking its dialect
all quiver and pump.
You may sleep,
but the novelist
in your chest
never sleeps,
minting yarns
bold, stylish, arid macabre.
When it gabbles,
alarms ring
up and down the ward.
“Are you all right?”
a nurse wakes you to ask,
and you know your heart
has been rambling again
while you slept,
slipping off the hoods
and turning all
its falcons loose.
At home alone
across the lake,
a darkness too possible
invades the house
and my chest becomes
shrunk tight by worry.
Mi casa es su casa.
I want to fly
to that ward
black as a mine shaft
where you drowse,
thatched deep
in wire and electrode,
still gamely
performing
a ventriloquism
from the heart:
on a monitor
your small light
glowing like radium.