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MY DEATH BEGAN

                   1

Last night, like a new cause, my death began.

I met the past, the days ahead without me.

Began as I stalked through the pass of love.

I saw my leaving. Not as it once was: hook!

Hook was that parting from another love

when I made the day’s deeds medallions.

‘Fish do not feel,’ that other love had said.

Fish-flesh a bag; hook-wrench; drift-light at sea.

                   2

My first love made my mind a trap for fear.

Last night I had no fear. I said, ‘I die.’

My first love taught me: look, the end of us

is pain, a tearing. Love me. Nothingness.

But nothing is, my love last night told me,

mere hole between the worlds that we define.

Feel round those holes, feel elbow-deep round them.

My time was up: I touched the worlds around.

Eating my bread in secret, I communed

with weak-back men, slack women of the plain;

with Macedonian bloods like lekking cocks,

louche orgies, wars and work, the sea around.

                   3

Such things the bedside light told, and I looked

down at a heap of dank and squeaking bones,

breasts and abdomen, that are now so neat,

I saw pushed to one side, chewed chicken, gone.

I paddled in the going, while I held

the unrecognisable other from the tomb.

I saw her future with no jealousy.

I felt my death begin. I had begun.

Alan Marshfield

   

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