T. R. Hummer - After the Afterlife: Poems

Portals to other dimensions are crystalline, Diamantine, they show distorted tableaus of the nameless place, but you cannot pass, Rat, you are forbidden. At fourteen, my daughter is a study in the purity of sweet alienation, Surrounded by concertina wire and fiery customs officials and what looks, through my fogged telescope, Like an ectoplasmic minefield. She studies the face of the armadillo, the profile of the hooded rat. I am The rat. I was there in the beginning, when she crossed the border from concealment into the realm Of the unconcealed. I held her documents in my clawed paw.

I squealed until she saw me. She took what I offered, She reached the gate, and was permitted. That is a life. This book of her face holds a record of her journey In a golden tetragrammaton illegible to rodents. On the shelf of her psyche, the rabbit, the cow, the holy dog, And the owl shake their heads in animal disgust that a rat should have a passport. Friends, it was never mine.

If it were, like her, I would be human. If it were, like her, I would hold my beauty close to my belly, I would weep In dignified bliss, I would sail from one world to the next rich with solitude and language, bearing over My heart in its bone crate safe from the rat in steerage, brilliant pilgrim, beloved plaything, destroyer of worlds.