Second Childhood by Fanny Howe Page A

or kissed into the lips of strangers.

    I have to pass through the estuary
    to investigate breakdown as a trail of nerve-endings
    at the beginning of everything.
    Scrapes like threads seeking holes.
    It’s a strange textile that serves as a road map.
    This one did:
    its blue led to the edge.
    Where could a fabric begin and end except as a running woman
    who sews and passes it along?
    So I ran with it in my hands.
    A kind of eucharist.
    No break in its material from the first day on earth
    to the Sabbath where all are equal
    and the cows covered in sackcloth.

    Where has my mind gone?
    The bloody thieves
    are very quick.
    You may have noticed I’m naked
    and sliced by glass.
    Soon words will be disappeared
    and then the Celtic church
    and seven friends
    I will not name.
    One word that contains
    so many:
    dearth, end, earth, ear, dirt, hen, red, dish, it and
    I must examine each part
    then cut the ropes without a heart and set out.

    The slide downhill on my back to a ledge
    and the sea out there and a city
    to the left of the mud.
    The place they call an area
    preparing for an earthquake. Under-shade and crowds
    of hungry old people lining for bread.
    One woman collapsed on her side
    and another helped her up
    and I was let into the bunker
    by the best kind of communist.
    There was orange vomit on a large cape over a large woman.
    The hills! No bells.
    I went down for what reason.
    Not to enter a cell.
    Luckily no one was white.
    We discovered we were in a loft space from the olden days
    that I indicated pleased me
    because I couldn’t get my body out no matter what.
    I paused long enough to encounter
    a slender elder with the delicate posture of a Rastafarian.
    The people were indifferent as they are to whites but polite.
    The lean man showed me the door in colorful clothing.
    But there was a huge blast from the building beside us
    And we ran up rickety stairs to look at what
    was now a structure speared with broken glass and stone.
    A worker was already being transported on a stretcher.
    We looked around at the mess then went inside to discuss
    our love of failures, every one of us.

    I hauled so many children after me
    with ropes and spears and nets
    like sea-creatures that others would eat
    without them I have no purpose.
    As in the Gospel account, I believed in their belief.
    But now there would be what? For he, the little one,
    was kneeling and saying, You must run.
    The lover I still loved stayed near the door
    so I raced off, you stood, when the police came
    seeking coherence in everything.
    The total machine of retribution presses on.
    Regardless of a prayer or what a person did.
    This is incredible.
    We’re breaking up.

    A Trappist led me around as one of him
    to a ship heading for the country where they edit the best films.
    There was a city on deck: residential with pleasing evening trees
    and then a downtown area until we couldn’t tell the suns
    from the portholes on board.
    The ship would transport us to a staging dock in Iona.
    I would lose my luggage from the twentieth century
    (though its particles and buckles were forged in eternity)
    and make my private vows to the creator
    in every theater we entered.

    Together we traveled in a boat as it filled with night-water
    from the bottom up.
    By night-water one means fear.
    So the refilling is adding a sting to the salt.
    Living naked
    still leaves you covered
    by a surface of wood, feathers, fur or skin.
    Bare skin, blue skin: a muff of lambskin
    over the ears where the thief can get in.
    It’s lucky the mind freezes before the heart.

    Back there is the string of mountains your uncle painted
    and you lost. Out there is the clotted cream
    on a raspberry tart that he couldn’t finish.
    There is the goose and the blackbird, the brindled donkey
    and the trap. They stand on the thin black thread of your lineage.
    Your scissors are split, your fiddle is cracked, its strings are thin
    and your mouth is dry, your clothes American.
    No more rush of notes as if a