sat on a grass bank, shaggy head, a monumental woman, not young, with
a hole in her head
the brown mouth on her temple speaking when she lowers her eyes
it was there when she was born, and her head grew middle-aged around
it it came quietly
throughout her childhood
it was created by surgery: punched out
- trepan, n. from trype, a hole
- trepan, n. from trappe, a snare, a cheat, a deceiver
she looked into me, not directly not as down a well or with a flashlight
into a closet, she looked with an inner periscoping from her own well-known
dark into my dark, and what she saw was an evasion, somewhere else, not
always, but a trapdoor always ready, a dread
the lies and solitude of childhood
love not trusting itself
a leak or flood
priesthole: where priests hide when soldiers search
the habit of ducking out just when the most exciting things are going to
happen
- the house of short journeys and learning
- the house of long journeys and marriages
the woman with the hole in her head she lets herself out through it
on a fine line shaking up loose and nice like a parachute out of a diver,
cord like a vapour trail, bridges
herself, angles, levers herself into
an existence, adjacent
oh help me she cried across the table to her friends i'm feeling religious
the woman with the hole in her head she dies when she leaves
through her eyes you can see a sleeplit twilight as in
a house whose inhabitants have left a candle at the icon
what surrounds the hole is body, brown, thick, fleshy food
breaking and rotting veins
swollen on the backs of the hands woman's
condition and the mother, folded inside and pushing outward, loathed
a coma of avidity, a sucky baby watery
flesh full of them the heavy worms of gravity death,
but the old can be dry and light, body shrunk to fit
the woman with the hole in her head she pulls the curtains a little
and looks out the porthole there is a sea shaking quietly
behind her the interior geography of a saltmine, timbers and ladders,
warm pools, internal flanks glistening with water, a nocturnal people on
their heels around an ember black kettle steaming just
visible (red) steam
- confession is when you tell what you have withheld
- advanced confession is faster
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