für Gretchen[1]

In my blindness I see the ladybird

on my finger as a pearly drop of blood,

and I suppose its black spots

to be wormholes, swallowing whole

my successive squints. And now here

I would stop, why blot any further

reality’s ruptured image. I stand here

on a stool, leaning out the narrow

toilet window, in rolled up sleeves that

the white folds might better pad

my fussy elbows. Shirt to stern-

um unbuttoned, the autumn sun

beats down on my face and awfully

ill chest that will send me to the grave

before long, or after, with any luck. Lady

hasn’t budged an inch, stranded

a hot knuckle from the pink nail-

bed, and red, riddled with holes, as if

oozing into the light from the bone

whose tissue in the poem begins

to crumble. The drop of blood isn’t my own,

as we say, I didn’t suck it from my thumb,

it landed there, plucked from thin air;

as the sky filled with tissue and bone.

[1] Gretchen, Gréta, meaning: pearl (gift of the sea)