Angels, having wings, are six-limbed insects.
We were culled from them—a bloody operation
that dropped us dizzy and bruised on a hard
continent—and mosquitoes, those loose relatives
of our relatives, fittingly dine on us, injecting
our insides with diluvial hosts. Feverish,
we lie between sodden sheets, inverted beetles
birthing ourselves into a new fear whose name
we will learn in time to be Unknown. Time,
which might or might not draw to a close,
gnaws in secret at the timber of eternity;
each day, passing through the doorjambs
of morning, we sweep its dust worriedly.
What little clings to the hand we sip
in our morning tea—an unwelcome
but discreet grit that barely itches
down the throat.
                             Just like us, the gods
are suffering from a recent population
explosion. Though flesh can hardly tell
the One with many faces from the Many,
they all wield one cruelty, which is a kissing
cousin to ours. Gods of Iran and Persia,
gods of deltas, gods on top of the mountains,
winged gods, six-legged ancestors we worship—
you dancing god whose staff tipped with a pine
cone and twined with ivy liberates brooks
in every heart of the woods—and you singing
god whose music is sweet, whose knife
parts the body from its skin-our kin
still strives to choose between your twin
surrenders, knowing full well that pain
is the only laurel either of you bestows
on his elected. Shall we turn in anguish
toward our Mother the Earth? Surely her lap
brims with love for her human clay? True,
her infinite affection embraces all creatures:
the moray eel and Sarcophaga carnaria,
the flesh fly whose offspring, perchance, anglers
might buy from the maggot vending machine
by the Nene in the English town of Northampton.

The Mother: by any other name, Life
remains that obsessive river whose flowing
tumbles the bruised orchid with the cream
puffs of the bride's cake.
Satisfaction is a lowly thing, how pure a thing is joy,
and ivy, which stands for faithfulness
(ask Apollinaire), smothers millennial
redwoods because it is a ruthless parasite.
Can we fault the ivy for its ardent
leaves and tight reticulated venation?
Mere tools in the mother's hand, we turned
it into an invasive species, unaware;
should it have turned us down?
It asked not for beauty, nor for killing.
The mother endows in mysterious ways,
and the ivy knows never to question,
but its human relatives are still in infancy.
Whether they can play the crucial game
remains to be seen. Life frowns at dusk
and worries about them, but not too much.
Besides, failed experiments have a strange
appeal.
                                                  Concern
yourself with what you cannot understand,
but from the corner of your eye, obliquely.
In death, our bodies merge with life to emerge
again as bodies; this truth consoles
us all, and yet does not—must never—help.
Like a perpetual tamper tantrum, we kick
at whomever would enfold us. Resistance,
too, is life and, therefore, perfect.

When I sleep, someone else dreams.
Each face wears a mask and under that mask
emptiness excavates the self greedily.
Each face wears
                            a mask and under that mask
another. Peel that, too—under the actor
the frightened girl; under that girl the angry convict.
Peel the mask again and again: from Greece
to Japan, all know that the inmost mask,
if it could ever fall away, would only reveal
the innermost void.
                                Each face wears a mask
and under that mask another. Do not peel
any of them—the mask is the flesh, layer
by layer, and also the soul.
You would only erode yourself to dust, ashes,
ice, to empty institutional light; you would only
lessen yourself, layer by layer—not that you are
not a lie, but your lie, as it lies between flesh
and bone, between the mind and the mind,
unfurls sturdily like the dewy cross of a fern.