Robert Winner

I try to carry the gravestone from the darkness of my mother's sickroom— scratches of light around drawn shades— outside, the gold and red of autumn. She is like a queen in exile scraping with her nails on silk walls her message of anger, her weak insatiable demands and regrets. I want her to grow rosy old like a maple leaf, ripening, yielding only to that ice edged wind that must come and cut her down—like me, like everyone.

Opportunity I love you Windows and watermelons march down the street The air is nobody Sky is in position I am ready to endure my freedom A riderless horse on a saffron plain A lake that spins A tree that lets the wind decide

I'm an inexperienced mourner I don't even know how to begin to cry out like that old man wailing in the next hospital room— oi vay, oi vay—his two sounds beating against the wall. He makes me squirm but I get his message better than my own. How can I free myself like him? How can I know my place as he does, know how little I am? How can I mourn, the cheep of a trapped bird crying out violent sorrow? Old man, teach me. Help me reach the bowels of my cry and bring it up, coarse, rasping. Teach me to be disgusting. Help me to exile myself from all the populations of eyes and ears. Teach me to live in that country where no one else is, where I can bash to pieces my good breeding, my priests and pillars —no illusions, the self wiped out, unable to see or hear or understand. Old man—lying in your shit— you've let the angel of death from your mouth. One minute of your unforgiving protest is like true song: reckless, fatal singing, song that is not victorious, not even consoling, merely a sound you have to make.

Surviving in its fragile skin, a white egret rises from the gulf of its strength. I want the lightest needle of a pine to fall on my hand, a pine with ravaged limbs. I'd stare through salt-blind eyes at a remote fragile sea.   I'd roar. I'd make the skeleton of grief. I'd roar like you, unreconciled sea.

Stripped to the waist, hard-muscled, downcast, under the guns of lounging guards, they are clearing a roadside across a palmetto landscape. I notice one blond boy swinging a pick, broad-shouldered.   His skin is smooth, bright, sweaty. His upright body ripples under the rigid fury of his face. His bulging eyes fixed on the ground can see mountains, the destiny of his imagination he can never get to, where he could rest, a lion in the wilderness of his flesh. I see the body with its own career of gestures— its bright roads, its dark roads apart, serene. . . Men must be carved, apparently, like slaughtered steers or pigs to find the marble of their bones innocent, innocent after all as the stones they break, or rain, or the guards in cages of their white voices. Trapped in one chained line, one terrifying combination of arrangements, driven to taste each other's flesh. . . The body sings alone among the earth's arrangements ignorant of crimes or dreams or the curious idea of justice.