The curtain gathers more thickly, quickly – falling,
it is snaking at my feet. Its head and eyes disappear
as if part of a magician’s trick. It is flagging off with its tail.

There is warm water pooling from the salt on the edge --
I realise that this death is not killing me,
I am a wavery river and my snug, loving belly is beckoning me.

I dangle between two cliff-sides as stark
as two giant pelvic girdles. There is no mothering here.
In this wind-full valley, the echoes are heavy and resonant.

The darkness braids its thick rag rugs. How I hang
and starve in position! In the stocks, I am framed and neglectfully contained,
the bulky muscle precariously untwines

the umbilical cord. I am being pushed and I keep swinging wider and wilder.
I am a monstrous bucket and the panic of it is sloshing its hot black needles.
I must stop it from tilting, from sprouting and flourishing like the sinister

crown of a tree. There is a cackle flickering – the parody
is mocking what I have made of life.
O summers of childhood, when my pieces

were unaware. When trees were robed and disrobed Godfully
and their gestures were sure. My eye-sockets are hollow, spinning tunnels.
Their amnihooks are slipping and their wheeling whorls are sucking them in.