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So thus I lie here fearful of movement,my mind clamorous and hourly being beaten backinto this space, walled enclosure of weathered woodboardwhich, nailed to supports for a leaky roof,defines this ward. It is a nursery of strangeand swaddled lives, newly cut and created,having to be coaxed into quiescence by each of us in placein this double row of steel beds behind cloth screens.Beneath the covers, my wet underclothingcleaves to thigh and groin, and on the bed-sidetable left unopened, my dog-eared Crusoe.Out of each unquiet nightthere grows a sense that I am but remnantcast up from another life, nothing that is whollyman, thrown up log-like, upon the beach, this bed.I wonder if one at least among my childrenmooning at visiting hour about my bedhas not already seen me thus - being hauled Intoward the shore in the tangled long netswith the fish. I wonder if he was not disturbedas the mud-yellow blotched skin emergedfrom the tides, then the full form, inertand being pulled in slowly without a fight.A touch of dying algae rises from the pillowspiled high to ease my back . . .Image of her face was once enough to serveas promise that I would transcend all anxiety,all pain, all that in my life was merely trivial,that wholly through the senses I might finda breach in the division that standsbetween a heaven and an earth. Six yearsof marriage reduced her to bone and parchmentbled her of what she had been for children that she bore,live ones and dead. I was open once moreto bait, laced with scent of younger skin, younger flesh,I who had for her foresworn all prostitutesall wayward, unprotected women.Here now I lie . . . and watch myselfdaily being mixed deep into body's change,water into soft earth, becoming sludge. I may yetlabour through suppuration of the flesh,skin's discoloration, swelling at the ankleor the face, the mess that comes from mindor the bowels going slack . . . and see no signin this travail pointing to another kind of birth.These must be the resolution of my acts, my end.16WESTERLY, No.2, JUNE, 1989