The midsummer sea, the hot pitch road, this grass, these shacks that
       made me,
jungle and razor grass shimmering by the roadside, the edge of art;
wood lice are humming in the sacred wood,
nothing can burn them out, they are in the blood;
their rose mouths, like cherubs, sing of the slow science
of dying – all heads, with, at each ear, a gauzy wing.
Up at Forest Reserve, before branches break into sea,
I looked through the moving, grassed window and thought „pines“
or conifers of some sort. I thought they must suffer
in this tropical heat with their child´s idea of Russia.
Then suddenly, from their rotting logs, distracting signs
of the faith I betrayed, or the faith that betrayed me –
yellow butterflies rising on the road to Valencia
stuttering „yes“ to the resurrection; “yes, yes is our answer,“
the gold-robed Nunc Dimittis of their certain choir.
Where´s my child´s hymnbook, the poems edged in gold leaf,
the heaven I worship with no faith in heaven,
as the Word turned toward poetry in its grief?
Ah, bread of life, that only love can leaven!
Ah, Joseph, though no man ever dies in his own country,
the grateful grass will grow thick from his heart.