louis

I am the stalk.
My roots go down
to the depths of the world,
through earth dry with brick,
and damp earth,
through veins of lead and silver.

I am all fibre.
All tremors shake me,
and the weight of the earth
is pressed to my ribs.
Up here my eyes are green leaves,
unseeing.

I am a boy in grey flannels
with a belt fastened by a brass snake up here.
Down there my eyes are the lidless eyes
of a stone figure in a desert by the Nile.
I see women passing with red pitchers to the river;
I see camels swaying and men in turbans.
I hear tramplings, tremblings, stirrings round me.

But let me be unseen.
I am green as a yew tree
in the shade of the hedge.
My hair is made of leaves.
I am rooted
to the middle of the earth.
My body is a stalk.

I press the stalk.
A drop oozes
from the hole at the mouth
and slowly, thickly,
grows larger and larger.
Now something pink
passes the eyehole.
Now an eye-beam
is slid through the chink.

Its beam strikes me.
I am a boy in a grey flannel suit.
She has found me.
I am struck on the nape of the neck.
She has kissed me.

All is shattered.

virginia woolf