You are the radiance I saw In the gangling height of poplars Leaves bird-white and poised Swaying with a skeleton laugh The ghosts of Mao’s sparrows Told me to flee south Through the ordered pathways Of a cultivated land The harsh geometry Of blunt roads bleeding into dirt A hollow fist of silos Travelling with the bare-faced negligence Of wanton hope They once baptised me in a tub As if a bucket were a river A river an eye opening To a heightened realm, where The bemused damp strands Of thinned hair Against my scalp A mocking kind of laurel As bright in the moment As any glow a Byzantine would wear Side pierced through with arrows Heart splayed in cupped hands Proffered like a bird Or Sunday afternoon baklava Embryonic, drowned in honey The bee almost perfectly preserved With that furied, alien look Grown monstrous, under the glass bell The thick slow taste Of songbirds In the golden day Disproving Ferlinghetti’s theorem We disappear like metaphors