SUMMER SHEETS

SUMMER SHEETS   7/29/19

Damp thin webs are blown against me by the wind of time.
Cannot fend them off, so reach out for the edges of these ragged sheets
And when I grasp a hem,
Which might be torn,
I pull it to me, wrap it around me.
I will not let it become a shroud,
But rather make a cocoon where I can change
Unobserved. uninterfered with,
Because I will not -- cannot anyway -- resist this enfolding,
This reversal of shedding snakeskin
As the snakeskin slips over me.
It is nearly transparent so far, but reticulated and hashmarked like a snake.
I hear no rattle.  I see no fangs.

Now and then a memory like a flower petal comes and sticks
And shapes itself to me
And briefly I recall its living scent
But then the wind blows it all away and I only recall
That I used to know that smell.

Sometimes it's paper
-- soaked, burnt, shredded, inked --
But it doesn't stick. It blows on by.
It is the remnants of wasps' nests
Built in the eaves of old country houses,
But now the stinging is gone.

Sheets, the diaphanous sheets of hot afternoon
And the fetid sheets of near-morning watiing for laundry.
Sometimes no-sheets, the striped and stained mattresses of poverty.
Sometimes I find blades of grass.

When someone in a madhouse became agitated
In the years before the shots and pills,
They were wrapped in a wet sheet, a mummy.
(O, mum, give it up!}
The SM people might use Saranwrap.  Restraint.  Restraint. Transparent.
One becomes still.  We know how.

Someday -- ore probably some moon-ridden night --
The chrysalis will burst and we will have wings (at least you will)
With all your molecules re-arranged into new patterns.
New being.
We (or at least you) will join that great ejaculation across the sky
They call the Milky Way.