The Making of the English Working Class

                                    1.

I thought my brother would be among the monks
leftover in this world. With the shiny pallor

of a just-painted still life, he was good at keeping
quiet, warding off the sallies of someone strong.

It was mortifying, the mementos of his own
ascesis piled in little heaps inside his room, relics

of the kind of body that can go a long time
without sleep or food. He told me it was love

that made the world go round. Our mother
was a nun to him in her spotless cotton shirts.

She never cooked. Sometimes I am numb
to the world’s noise. And when we went

to temple, people sat in the pews like they were
at the movies, it made no difference to them.

My body was there, but my mind was elsewhere,
wandering through wealds where lives where virginal

and wild, wondering about the bodies of ancient
queens and where they were buried, maybe on beaches

where I wrote my name, improvident, and hoped
to be seen. If not now, in some other, quieter time.


2.

Have you ever loved so much the truth of your own
death came home to you? In Manchester, 1833,

half of the children born to spinners died. The pelvic
bones of girls who worked in the mills could not make room

for the new life coming through. Children given
dirty rags to suck were dying from disease.

It’s possible to die from not being touched, no one
knew that then, and the monks were not to be disturbed

in their dark adorations, their ancient formulas
for making something potent go away, be quiet, good.

Sometimes I sing when I’ve light,
but not in the dark; I dare not sing then.



3.

When a child’s skin is translucent, people think
he could be anything. I am learning even now

that this is not the case. Even when a page
is blank, certain things can and can’t be said.

My father was safe in his hospital lab, studying cells
gone awry in bodies and how to kill them off.

My brother taught me young that there are rules that are
heretical. Over the beaches of the Queen of Carthage

the sky must have been like a face with its features
rubbed out. If I keep my head down long enough

I’ll be there, in my longstanding withdrawal from
the present moment. And like the remnants

of an ancient still life, the stars still look at us,
safe in their monadic, monastic, inscrutable rites.