Father to the Son of Himself

His body haunts her:
wiry homunculus caught in her coiled soul.

He knows only what he's heard,
and father to himself, he's heard too much
and passed it to himself only to hear it damned
for the minutiae of reality that's been left out,
facts known only by a son who's lived with his father
long enough to know the man's incalculable ways of being himself,
facts concealed in a scratch of one right index finger across
the lower, rounded bottom of a cheek filled with chew,
for instance.

But his skin soft soap, she says, his manroot firm
between these lips, his tethered sacks of seeds round
in the hollows of my palms, his need coursing
in the tubular canals of his guts like steam,
his voice, his comfort wrest from me my self.

I will son him on the banks of this withered river,
the gangly youth of him, the man who placed my head
on this root overlooking the endlessly falling water
and held my breasts together with his hands
while the last stirrings of the world died down.

But the son who remembered the self of his father
spoke softly the few words which named him,
and left her body.  She whispered all of this to me
much later, when all I had to offer her was this.
And her son like the bamboo thicket in her garden grew wild.

Leo Obrst