IT TAKES A MAN

It takes a man in all he might be

heavy twisted rope of consequence

of no consequence

weighed in the balance and found wanting.

Not a man but a twister.

Outside the mob demanding: ‘Who comes?

Who is it now dares speak for us,

for our lives?’

                        The virtues work

                        through us. They do not

                        indwell. They do not

                        inhere. They are not

                        in here. There are no

                        virtuous people

                        only good acts,

                        always virtue and its opposite –

                        the virtues working through us.

It takes a man to unmake

his masculinity, to unmake

the man they made him.

We are come to this. Coming

here in all innocence, willing to hear,

willing to be made and unmade

and taught the virtue of checking

our facts, consistency, avoidance of error,

making a life appear reliable,

a narrative, a story we tell others:

                        My name is … I live at … I am …

                        I have … I want to … with you

that they may understand who it is

speaks to them today,

and who they are every day of their lives

until there are no more days.

Someone will come after me and say:

‘This poem was said once, as I am saying it

now,

as others will say of me:

“He breathed – he spoke – he stood

in the garden at midnight and wondered

at the wonder of a mortal brain

coming to consciousness, the cruelty of a mortal brain

          coming to consciousness,

          the birth and death

          of individual consciousness.”’

Living appeals, as you appeal

          to me, as I appeal to the gods – those crazy imaginary gods –

as I appeal to the soldiers

beating on my door 

The great Emathian conqueror did spare

The house of Pindarus … 

But in wartime

Husbands dragged from wives

Sons from mothers.

          At Rodez once

          the Nazis in retreat

          shot thirty maquisards,

          smashed in their skulls with stones

          to finish it. At Rodez in August 1944

          the day before the town was liberated.

          At Rodez, the wind out of Rodez,

          whipping the hill, whipping the old asylum

          carrying the cries of the mad

          to the townsfolk, the benighted townsfolk,

          the cries of Antonin Artaud,

          still awaiting liberation

          at the psychiatric hospital

          with its garden and little chapel,

          the asylum where he grew his hair

          and was visited nightly there

          by his daughters of the heart.