Natal Command

1. Cross-hatchings, palm and rain, clapboard faded to the grain, half-shutters open to old vines and mangroves draining their own shadows; recollecting what the body knows suspended between coral and shifting images of cloud ... After death, after the knowledge of death, his death, his face, unwrapped, already yellowed, papery, recovered with a small white cloth then lowered away and shut to the earth; So pierced, so mute, these words re-opening: Not this. 2. The rain had gone. I swam against the current, harnessed by water till I turned and swung out with the tide, shouldering deep into a rhythm of my own, long strokes pulled under the body and returning past the glinting crease in which I breathed, the sea half-woken like another body bedded into sheer transparency, the outer reaches granular with light. Comebacks. Chains of radiance. Far more than meet the eye. What do they meet then, intimate but otherworldly, mimicking the world? I looked back at the land’s thin edge, pines along the shoreline near a fort where cannons rust, mouths left open among thistleweed around the dozing moat. Far back among fallen needles, pigeons shuffle through shade, their feathers iris underlight, soft flares bob the dark. The land had disappeared. The sun had followed it. From either wrist, half-mingled with my breath into the night, a trail of ungloved phosphor travelled back. 3. Sounds too have their surfaces: within the mortal frame, particles of blood revolve as in a sort of heaven where breath moves through us as an unseen light; but when the marrow bonds are parted they in turn set loose what has been called the soul ...