The bus is full and thick with fug:
we’re all bundled up for winter. I take a hankie
from my pocket and wipe the misty window.
A young woman standing at a bus stop looks up at me
and I’m back in last summer’s Luxembourg Gardens,

where a young woman standing by a hedge
drops her jeans and underwear,
bends at the waist and grips her knees —
a long rope of urine shoots out of her in a glittering arc
and drums loudly on the lawn behind.
I look away, but later wish I hadn’t.

The bus stops and everyone get out:
old women who can raise storms,
children who can jump and count up to sixty,
men who know the name of the next winning horse
and smell of smoke, mums with covered prams.
I may never see them again, but their breath
is tucked in my pocket, soaking my handkerchief.

Among the woodlands and green meadows
there are hints of paradise: the weave of roads
I walk upon, the rivers glinting in the sun,
the reeds whisper which way I should go
and flies sit high up in the trees and sing.

But sometimes I have work to do,
as when I’m hurried to a house
where an old man lies among the candles,
his puffy soul still closed inside his corpse,
like a mindless face floating on the dark.

They seat me at a laden table and bid me eat
dishes that reek of cost and opulence,
thick with the fatty gravies of the dead one’s sins:
I suck away layers of softest skin like masks,
I swallow the disguises of his soul.

When I’m tight with wickedness they shove me out,
as though any dog could take on sins unscathed.
But I walk the briars and wildways for a day,
until I find a scarecrow in some lonely field
and just beneath its raggy arse I shit

the plump and steaming coil of that man’s sins.
I watch sweet flies descend to lay their eggs,
knowing maggots soon will bathe and suckle there.
When I’m long gone those grubs will turn to flies
and sins will rise like prayers upon the winds.

With heaven in my eyes I walk these roads
and though I’m shunned none will do me harm,
for all must take the sacrament of death,
that sustains me like the soft preserving hand
of my Lord who is a voice among the reeds.