Elements Of Composition

Composed as I am, like others, of elements on certain well-known lists, father's seed and mother's egg gathering earth, air, fire, mostly water, into a mulberry mass, moulding calcium, carbon, even gold, magnesium and such, into a chattering self tangled in love and work, scary dreams, capable of eyes that can see, only by moving constantly, the constancy of things like Stonehenge or cherry trees; add uncle's eleven fingers making shadow-plays of rajas and cats, hissing, becoming fingers again, the look of panic on sister's face an hour before her wedding, a dated newspaper map, of a place one has never seen, maybe no longer there after the riots, downtown Nairobi, that a friend carried in his passport as others would a woman's picture in their wallets; add the lepers of Madurai, male, female, married, with children, lion faces, crabs for claws, clotted on their shadows under the stone-eyed goddesses of dance, mere pillars, moving as nothing on earth can move &mdash I pass through them as they pass through me taking and leaving affections, seeds, skeletons, millennia of fossil records of insects that do not last a day, body-prints of mayflies, a legend half-heard in a train of the half-man searching for an ever-fleeing other half through Muharram tigers, hyacinths in crocodile waters, and the sweet twisted lives of epileptic saints, and even as I add I lose, decompose, into my elements into other names and forms, past, and passing, tenses without time, caterpillar on a leaf, eating, being eaten.