Elegy of the Wind

White light, receive me your sojourner; O milky way, let me clasp you to my waist; / And may my muted tones of twilight / Break your iron gate, the burden of several centuries, into twin tremulous cotyledons ... // Man of iron throat — for I will make broadcast with eunuch-horn of seven valves — / I will follow the wind to the clearing, / And with muffled steps seemingly out of breath break the silence the myth of her gate. // For I have lived the sappling sprung from the bed of the old vegetation; / Have shouldered my way through a mass of ancient nights to chlorophyll; // Or leaned upon a withered branch, / A blind beggar leaning on a porch. // I have lived the oracle dry on the cradle of a new generation ... / The autocode leans on a porch, the branch dissolves into embers, // The ashes resolve their moments / Of twin-drops of dew on a leaf: / And like motion into stillness is my divine rejoicing — / The man embodies the child / The child embodies the man; the man remembers / The song of the innocent, / Of the uncircumcised at the sight of the flaming razor — // The chief priest of the sanctuary has uttered the enchanted words; / The bleeding phallus, / Dripping fresh from the carnage cries out for the medicinal leaf ... // O wind, swell my sails; and may my banner run the course of wider waters: // The child in me trembles before the high shelf on the wall, / The man in me shrinks before the narrow neck of a calabash; // And the chant, already all wings, follows / In its ivory circuit behind the thunder clouds, / The slick route of the feathered serpent ...