Woman, behold thy son!

(I am a brother to dragons, and a companion
to owls.)

It is in the night that my imaginings
open out; the darkness feeds them,
breeding and changing them from within.
If tears dampen my sleep, if
memory mutates and stalks me,
its vegetable roots inside me and its
white flowers opened in the dark
above my bed - if I am shaken
by the distance of past pain,
I must feel no shame.

We heard a sound outside -
a night bird's shriek that for a moment
chilled your bed's security.
You tell me that the cries of owls
foretell a house in mourning...
there are many deaths in darkness;
this cry portends the
end of some small creature only -
a little death we echo here.
          Your wing covers me,
dark wings cover me, warming my
forgetting and allowing it to flower here,
black and never quite complete.
My shame comes strangely with the lack
of grief, or with its weakening;
it goes with my awakening.

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