A poem by the Flemish writer Erwin Mortier

Augustine’s Confession

(book fourteen)

Long have I read man

thumbed the registers of the eye

read the dialect that governs arms

legs peritoneum –

and the binary code of sex

and the tectonic urge that on a counte-

nance makes continents quake

cleaves the masses there turns oceans

of silence red, to ice. Long have I plunged

myself into man among the canopy

which their confusion of tongues erects

eaten screwed like a hermit

read my way through the flesh of man

with the malleable dictionary

that shrouds me. My vertebrae

are still grinding through the alpha-

numerical thrashing. What then

is man am I that wandering Babel

this contrary concert? I trembled

when I read my hypotheses my lemmas

without lock I felt the dread. And found

Thee. Placed Thee behind my lines.

God plug in my bath my

close-fitting tub. Then secretly

peed in Thee.