My family tree is mist and darkness.
Century after century,
one lay upon the other begetting me.
Then my millennium in marshes
and wandering obscurity
revealed my heritage:
monster, I lack immortality,
my race is superfluous on earth.
The last, the final generation
—after me no other, or someone else—
I lay down on top of death.
We keep our appointments with fate,
even if fate does not;
though no one came to kill me, I died.
I the ghost that I begot.
My tree is night and fog.
                        

Up on chairs as if they were floating
toward the kitchen ceiling, two sisters
are having hems set to the season's height,
to the middle of the knee, and no higher,
though they beg for half an inch, a quarter.
Robust and red-haired, they are two angels
beaming and grinning so they could never blow
the marvelous clarions their cheeks imply
—and I, fang still tender, venom milky,
small serpent smitten, witless with pleasure,
idling, moving my length along, spying,
summoned to Paradise by giggling
and chatter.
             I saw this all
in the needle's eye—before time put it out—
compressed to two girls' gazes, hazel-eyed
and blue-eyed, one gentle, one imperious,
the soul at focus in its instant of sight,
expressive, shining there, revealed;
the seed of light flew down, a spark, two bits
of human seeing, and lay upon my heap
of gazes, bliss inexhaustibly blazing.