Outside the Work

A hundred days before I met the stranger
who forced me off the road
and did not leave his name

I dreamt of walking out of a landscape
as if out of a painting –
tipped from the picture by its tilting fields.

I was now outside the work
watching the shadow who walked beside me
indicate that I should return.

Where to? The tangled woods.
Brief figures rose beside the path
in encouragement or warning.

When I looked on each, light was cast
as if they were there for me to invest.
That was the night of the day of the dead.

A hundred nights followed in quick winter
and the day came when I was thrown into sleep
and then held under – beyond the woods,

beyond composition, beyond dream.

                              *

What took place was a form of deletion.
I wasn’t here.
I wasn’t.

When I say I remember nothing I mean
what being nothing is:
within density, without form.

My mind has de-scripted what happened.
I was forced off the road.
It is unwritten down.

                              *

I thought it was the furthest I had been from my body
but I was only my body

Others stepped in to cut out, secure, transport, open,
repair and close my body. They stepped into my body.

It is my body that enacts what happened.
It recognises shape in movement or texture in sound

as if this were music and my body compelled
always to dance, trapped in the song.

                              *

I’m getting better at waking up
and knowing I’m here and where here is.
Where is becoming here and here I am.

I nearly died and I didn’t.
As I lay among my medication
news came of friends who died. They are dead.

What aligns?
What opens?
What closes?

                              *

When I first woke and could remember waking
I was outside time and in love with them all.

I held them deep in conflation
at the pure point of recognition.

Oh the falling away!
Walking back along an ancient hall

I cast off my wounds, my armour, my sword,
looking neither beyond nor towards

and without slowing down.

                              *

The shock arrived as an abstract form of horror.
I had no specific fear but could not be alone in a room

and would follow my daughter, my sister, my spouse
if they went upstairs. They had to call out

to let me know of their continuing existence.
I had dreams of ordinary life

in which I moved through the world without thinking
and so was able to think of other things.

A life spent thinking of other things.

                              *

When my mother and I
once manoeuvred a table of several parts

along a narrow passage
with tight corners and heavy doors

she issued instructions on how to proceed
in terms of the movement of a newborn’s

unfused skull. I have lost faith
in space, depth, dimension, completion,

in the act of moving through the world in one piece.
In being one piece. My broken head

with its lunar terrain and spectral titanium
holds itself at the ready in parts.