Here I am, looking at you, my orphan. Your thick scarf. Your cold cigarette. A screech of love would be of no avail: the underground winds bear off the sound to other stations trembling and straining on creaking branch-lines. Here I am, looking at you, so firmly ensconced, so fully grounded: hands wired up to your computer, your phone, your TV, your coffee grinder. The soil in which your seedlings grow is properly sanitized with baby disinfectant, well fertilized with baby oil, hoed diligently by grown-ups’ tongues saying swiftly and often: “We love you, our dearest.” All the worms of conscience are exterminated; they won’t gnaw the cortex of a tired brain, or leave their white deposits in your thoughts. Here I am, looking at you, with everything going just right, your house flourishing with love and money; every spring the cracks in the plaster heal, and new sofas and wardrobes sprout like ovaries. Here I am, looking at you ploughing your wife’s lap, sowing the seed; later in the dark of your shower touching the scab, feeling the scars, remembering the thick sap running down your fingers and darkening in the wind; thinking: let the sap flow and flow—the roots are powerful; I was bent but am still unbroken. Some fluff from your towel lands like a red mosquito on your dripping hair. That’s the only way your pillow gets wet these days. You dream of grown-ups, all with claws, and only you are soft, with sticky fingers holding a raw fly; your mummy’s saying, “You should be ashamed of yourself!” Here I am, looking at you, my lignum vitae, looking at you, my orphan, my toddler, my lost baby, my burning bush, my weeping birch, my poisonless ivy. My fingers stick, I have no power to fly like a seed to your neighbor’s garden, to bindweed out of harm’s way. Here I am, stalking the grass around you, gathering blackberries.
Translated by the author, revised by Robert Reid