An afternoon, late summer, in a room
Shuttered against the bright, envenomed leaves;
An under-water world, where time, like water
Was held in the wide arms of a gilded clock,
And my grandmother, turning in to the still sargasso
Of memory, wound out her griefs and held
A small boy prisoner to weeds and corals,
While summer leaked its daylight through his head.
I feared that room, the parrot screeching soundless
In its dome of glass, the faded butterflies
Like jewels pinned against a sable cloak,
And my grandmother winding out the skeins I held
Like trickling time, between my outstretched arms;
Feared most of all the stiff, bejewelled fingers
Pinned at her throat, or moving on grey wings
From word to word; and feared her voice that called
Down from their gilded frames the ghosts of children
Who played at hoop and ball, whose spindrift faces
(The drowned might wear such smiles) looked out across
The wreck and debris of the years, to where
A small boy sat, as they once sat, and held
In the wide ache of his arms, all time, like water,
And watched the old grey hands wind out his blood.
