POEM ABOUT THE CAGES
WITH A SENTENCE FROM WALLACE STEVENS

                    Cage I
                    (The Cage)

No point mentioning the bars. It's dark.
The ceiling is low; the floor's cold.
You're bent double and up to your ankles
in dirty water. You've been told to empty
your pockets — but nothing's in them. And
your tongue has been lopped off. If she could,
she would press your heart in a book. Don't
think about it. Pretend the cage is empty.
That beating is only thunder, those open walls
are night sky. Pretend the dead know better.


                    Cage II
                    (The Heart)

At last, the heart has been driven out —
some persistent watery form, beating
or washing away. The jellied eye, the porous
bone: you're emptied. And now the unkind dead
moves in. Your trough is full of knuckles, and
somewhere — not too far off — the hard eye
of the sun rolls up. Around you the dark garden
wakens, all arms and tongues and rattling
like a bag of stones. A cold wind whispers
past the bars. You blink, but even
in good light, the upright observer insists
you're all there is, you're still alone.


                    Cage III
                    (The Drowning)

All light like a blow to the head and in the beautiful
prison you are a wreck of a small dimension.
Above you the faces of failure line up on the wire.
The sky is getting smaller. The horizon is letting go.
You're crouched, but yours are the strong legs of desire
and you can think of nothing but what shudders inside you,
what calls you by a name you know, what has always been,
what is always out there in that deeper sea drowning.


                    Cage IV
                    (The Stone)

Don't sing yet. She has finessed the stone to the bowl
of your mouth. And sun by sun you learn how to speak,
insisting on the obvious, the truth travelling down
the body's bent ladder. You think you make sense
of the song: you think you hear it in the narrow throats
of oracular birds, you hear it in voices beyond the bars.
The stone is warm behind your teeth. You're hungry,
you're restless. You paw through the trough; this time
you find nothing but small, hollow bones. The stone
is heating up, though the fire still seems far away.


                    Cage V
                    (Reprise)

You've done it again: banged your sorry
self against those bars. You're black
with sorrow, blue with anger. And
Charon takes that little honey
for a boatride. But you know it won't
last. You know her. She'll swim
the fucking river. She'll be back.


                    Cage VI
                    (The Awful Truth)

You'll have to kill her again. You'll see
the cage door open and you'll slip out. You'll
think you feel the nascent bud of a new tongue far
to the back of your mouth. But you're missing
the point. It is a violence from within
that protects us from a violence without.
You'll take the cage with you. We just go on.

First published in Kenyon Review