He was born with a reality bone exposed.
The doctors could do nothing. His parents were appalled
at the smell of paradise from the open wound
and the rainbow placenta trailing behind him
like a cloud of glory, snagged on the bone.
At first nothing showed. He grew up strong
and liked; but then it started to swell.
His friends sensed the sea lapping on an inner shore
and he spoke as if from a mountain top.
When he laughed the sun broke free of cloud.
But the bone’s tingling was midnight’s moonlit quiet.
Dawn’s birdsong was a window, a beech tree a door,
to a choir-haunted mansion built in wilderness.
The bone’s radar took him east, in search of home,
but the world’s wild pathways led right around.
So he stayed. Then love came knocking at his door.
It was like the bone’s memory of home, so he opened.
Her head was haloed in peacock’s feathers.
Her breasts were two cats, leaping in dapple.
She smiled, and he let her touch him on the bone.
Her scheming heart knew there would be no binding of it.
As she left him she elbowed it out of spite.
He cried into the world’s unwelcoming weather,
and wind and rain healed him in their rough way.
They kissed a skin across what had been raw.
The years blister and break like the singing of sisters.
The man with a reality bone once exposed
finds a place in the pattern, his weave in the dream,
though he renders no homage to a TV screen,
only to the angels moving under his skin.