Classic Poem

My Mother and My Birth

My mother was a snake, but warm:
In her a welling heart, spite unfrozen.
Hating, she loved.
Coiling to choke, she kissed.

And men were done then
Slowing in same doom-pause,
Same morrow of old sun.
They were about their deaths then —
They were worn, then, men,
To scant remainders of themselves,
And their kinds were fatal:
As comes the flowering-day
When seedlings take their names
And are the final things —
Which in their labelled promise
Seemed the first giant garden
Where beauty is such tropic horror
That death to make fright's suddenness
And self-sensation is not needful.

It being then such lateness
Of world, death-season,
Flowering, name-taking,
The cold snake to its melting came —
She was Contempt of Time,
That Spirit which at Origin
Bittered against the taste false-sweet
Of Future, on her lightning tongue
Already poison and corrupted Past.
This was my mother,
Who, when the mortal lag took haste
And death became contemporary,
Turned fond, and loved the flesh despised —
As ghouls the living love,
Their griefs claiming, adoring their disease.

Hers was the paradox I chose
To have heretic body of:
I, Spirit which at End
Greets remnant Now, to make
Beginning, in this prompt decline,
Of death's all-soon respited day,
Which, dawning infinite from death
Like night from night, encompasses
Entirety in its utter light:
This Self of Subsequence
To Time personally structured,
Touched, touching, minded, minding,
Interbreathing, interbreathed:
I, smalled laterness than Time,
My double-tongued snake-mother's singler meaning.

And it was idiot nature,
There to be babe, outfrowning from unborn,
And there to suckle swooning,
Giddy with dreadful newness of myself,
Clutching the stranger-breast
As shipwrecked orphan chooses
One stranger from the rest for friend,
By logic of confusion and by need
Of privacy against the many.

So fallible that nature:
For, being, I was none of her,
And she, delivered of me, held
No backward life of mine.
That union in material magic —
Her larger-than-herself, untrue extreme,
With my so smaller-than-self leastness —
Had magic's aftermath,
Materiality's division:
As if it had not been,
And she to snakehood's tears again,
And I to opposite sense of death —
Who yet an early flesh could have
Because Contempt of Time, relenting
On Time's sickness of time,
Grew time-like, stayed death's full succession.
For, in this mock-beneficence,
Regret, aged Nothingness, took charge
And was dissolving Everything —
By whose sophistry of flesh with spirit
Twilight-same, I argued me a body,
A flesh-prelude to myself,
With ancestry in snake-slough cast
Like silence from loud dumbness.

Oh, obscure!
Birth, body, is by darkness,
And mine by that opacity
Which, being death's late dawn,
Looms mystery-bright at truth-verge.
This night-time that I wage,
My temporal person, prophet of myself
In lazy mouth's futurities,
Must live, precede me mortally,
That I inherit of myself
By refutation of those semblances
Which liker, liker, are less like
To ultimate me as I remember
Oh, how not-like all to this survival
Of myself, this very-me made last
Of strange approximation to myself
In eager hesitancies —
Lest quickness of me be too instant,
And I but the unproven echo
Of dispersed original.

Therefore such quickness as makes life,
The stuttering slow grammaring of self
That death with memoried seeming crowns.
And were I otherwise myself
Than in a near-mistaken mask's
Gradual fading into true-face,
Then were I no fit face to welcome
Gradual Now familiarly to death,
No visible pied voice to mingle
Natural with garish hearing,
No idiom of life-translation
Leading Time to after-dwelling,
No almost-lie to warrant truth by,
No long event of me by which
To contradict eventfulness —
Oh, Contradiction,
World-being, human condition,
Stolen grace, outrage unfinal:
What farthest Next is End,
Composure, whole Cessation?
Nearer and nearer Next, till Now,
The measure over-fine, impossible,
Contradiction's life-length
Cut to the moment which is life and death
In one unlivable solution.
Then comes pure death, the grace compelled,
Duration cleansed of day-change.

In such rhythm of nearness, nextness, nowness,
From present arrestation borne a motion
Motionless toward present progress,
Thus I in fellowed dying walked
To Subsequence — taking the numerous path
That Time had greatly narrowed to,
Arriving there as at a home
General to all who dare be so undone,
Save for mortality remembered.