—Then how to address the place where the soul was not.
Should you have said, standing next to the trench,
this should have been you?
This darkness was not the terror of what we do to each other,
or the delicious sexual darkness he’d brought you
or the black corridors of the female body—
remember the early diagrams,
what the inside of a woman looks like?
A cow’s skull.
This darkness was the protection of the child,
it included the vast fluttering
as the oak included the moths
with its shadow—
remember in the brilliant day long ago,
the ball coming toward you?
You played with the other children like this—
not as anything—
blocked the sun with your non-
being as it were,
but by that pewter shadow you could be affirmed . . .
One by one they kissed you.
One by one the guests advanced themselves
into the night where you would have been
had they looked for you
though it was not in the dim night
that you’d planned to receive them
but at midday, when the druid oak
blossomed with moths, with being gone—