In the grove

I believe you, poet, when you write
of how the night is now more night
in the grove, how lightning

has nestled among the leaves*—
And you know that something heavier
than lightning glints in the branches,

has come to roost there too, ancient evil
waiting as if with forked ghost hands,
ghost wings to descend upon a passing bus

and tear the girl’s clothes from
her body, ram the metal heft
of that old, ineradicable hate

into her sex, into her gut—
In the cold of New Year’s day, hundreds
sit in a Darjeeling square to sing

a song: imagine the blood of evidence
made visible, not washed away; imagine
how the body wants only to arch

toward the infinite, how the smallest
fingernail or severed tendon wants to be
restored to the un-butchered whole—

~ *Octavio Paz

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.