What are the loci of comparison for Epode 16 and Eclogue 4, and at what points can we say they establish a conversation? The terms comparison and conversation are important, because they imply two different principles of reading, principles it will be helpful to elucidate before we attempt to answer the question. Comparison is an artificial, or better, synthetic act associated most directly with the reader-interpreter, the one performing the comparison. It comes from the Latin con + parare meaning literally, 'to match together, to pair, to make equal'. Comparison is synthetic because it is essentially creative – the reader links together two works hitherto unassociated (at least in his mind) so that each might illuminate and deepen his understanding of the other; it is artificial because the point of contact between the two works is not obvious or inevitable, but rather supplied and nurtured by the reader. The etymology of conversation is less straightforward, and therefore somewhat more revealing. It comes from the early French verb converser, which in turn comes from the Latin conversare, literally a turning towards, but also 'to pass one's life, to dwell, to hold intercourse with [sexual as opposed to Platonic], and [increasingly in modern French and English], to exchange words'. I would like to stress the notions of dwelling and intercourse. With conversation, we move from the primarily synthetic comparison to something more organic, sunontic, so to speak. What is it stake are two different views of literature: either literature is an accumulation of independent, self-composed entities or it is the space cohabit of many voices combining or colliding in a dissonant harmony that reuses and reproduces its own past. This is the space of history, and ideally the space we would like to investigate. However, since in practice it is difficult or impossible to find such an object without in part inventing it, we must of necessity mix the two, moving from congruencies that are too close to be accidental to the comparisons that these congruencies suggest. This will be our method for examining the poems.

Hikes in Winter Park

Fast tracks, a catalogue of signs, sticks
Sticking into the lonely snow:
I miss these wild groves, the aster elms'
Star-like dance; I miss the trance of lines
Bleeding under the powder, packed
Surface of frigid feet, whether elks'
Or boot eating skis, tracking their picking pokes,
Mountains nodding through still air, rabbits
Darting over frozen ground.

Things are better today. Last night I was strangled with lust, crushed under the weight of a bodiless body, embodied in the lack of all bodies, or one.

I'm trying to be productive, something to do at every hour of the day. Writing is a good way of focusing my thoughts onto a page. The page really controls you; I used to think I was creating worlds, but really I'm being created. Let me explain. Words and ideas are inseparable; the Romans believed that Piety, Justice, Victory, and Concord were gods. The words denoted deity; that is, ideas. Likewise, our conceptions are indelibly (and perhaps ineffably) linked to the words we use to describe them. When I say, "The impact of the Third Reich" – whatever Third Reich means as an independent concept, it maintains none of that freedom because in the sentence it has become a principal of collision. Birth, growth, life, and death – motion and stasis – these are the inevitable principals, that is, the first things, out of which all thought springs.

But poetry is inescapable. I want to tell you what I really mean, but every telling is the reworking, the revision of another telling, connected by repetitive phrases, by a repeating ego, by certain habits and facts, or doings, that make me who I am and not any other random predilection.

Last night I sat down at a computer and hacked out some very worrisome phrases, then I looked for any body I could. Lust is a delicious pain – if I could take a pill to eliminate these cravings, that is, to expel them from the threshold of my being...such a theatrical guest! Life becomes infinite under the power of lust, and because I can turn a blind eye to every other pursuit, because I'm blinded, deafened by the hideous roar of the music – such a cruel and powerful god. But it's nice to worship a god.

I wrote three or four pages yesterday. I'll write more. I have no more time to write letters today. I wish I could have sent you something descriptive rather than philosophical. I'm keeping all this.

From the Journal of a Madman, Transposing His Life Into Fiction

What to do with these chains of lust that bind me to the hard here, the fickle now? Lust for smooth, beautiful bodies and smiles, nods and kind words, appreciation and sanctification, but just not the brittle, cold, lost alone. Life heading through avalanches of pressure with the hope of a glimmer of light, but only the light of the winter sun. How cold, cruel, and distant is the sun -- so far away, so lost, so hopeless, so alone. If I've ever stood in his blinding light, if I've ever felt the warm carress of a fickle ray -- oh but it was fickle! -- and then I belted out a neat tune. Wavering in the sunlight, stretching tendrils out towards the sunlight, begging for understanding, for love, for warmth. Look at the catechisms of cliche I've fallen into: the mind without images falls into oblivion. Oblivion of shadows, wraiths, the forgotten beggar who paws for his cup of mulch: I don't want to be one sitting out there in the cold while the storms tumble down and the cars skid. The cars: who is in them? Everyone is in them. Going somewhere. I'm stationary. I'm the only man in the world who sits like a rock, and never moves. But time moves. Time is ticking, ticking down, away, dripping in yellow streams; every spurt of semen is a lost moment of youth. Do we crust over like syrup for sex? You are beautiful. I would tell you I'm staring at your ass. In my moaning, I'm going to spend another half hour here, hashing out my differences and my sorrows. How can I love you, or at least the image of you, long lanky brown hair frolicking the back of your neck in clumps, uneven folds, slight glasses, small face, small body -- so small, like a child. I guess I'll just write anything I want tonight. I don't do that often enough: write, journal style. Throw grammar and sentence structure to the winds (I just revised that). Just concentrate on this boiling tempest inside of me. Boiling: there will be no originality, there will be no meaning in these empty phrases! Oh I want you! I would tear off your shirt, suck your nipples, nibble them with my teeth, savor the flesh, collapse into the thawing warmth. What warmth! And if you didn't murmur a word but stroked the back of my neck with a light tickle or just the kind of scratch for a cur or a dog, how happy I would feel; I would moan. Not even the stirring of lust: I would lie on you like a mattress. I would curl up into you like a blanket. I would wrap myself into you, the way that I want to wrap myself into the void of an eternity. Jon! Oh the storms are coming, the faces are coming, these are the ramblings of a mad-man. People that I knew. Memories shuddering, rippling like the uncertain images of Heraclitean streams. That ass, the blue jeans. Why is it sex that I can only think of? Why does this organ keep me back from success? Sucsex, infiltrating everything, an ass. That ass! Long poetic meditations about the gluteus maximus and the maximus of the gluteus, or sugary something. I feel myself beginning to calm. The rages are quiet. Not someone to talk to that I needed at night, but just an outlet, some means of expressing all these thoughts that well up inside me along with desire, fear, and stress. It was to my own oblivion to ignore a journal for so long. But I want it to be good! Like a demon, demon of the astral flowers -- all the nymphs gather round and suck sweetly from the nectar and try to feed me, but it's the kind of pulp that if you eat it you are a thousand times hungrier and thirstier than you were the moment of partaking; and they are all sirens for sound. And I am a shipwrecked survivor of beauty. O for a memorable phrase! O for something like a raft I could gather myself up onto in this raging tempest! The storms come up again; like there's some gigantic beast moving in my stomach. Help! Help! Will there ever be the sanity to compose verses? The more I focus on him, the worse it gets! Like the sun has descended into the middle of the ocean and become the black hole, the principal of the perturbations. Trepidations of the spheres. Oh could I ever go up to any man I loved and simply say, "I love you. From the moment I saw you, the very way you move, I need to bury myself in you..." Like a tomb. The perfect realization of love would be death. Now the thoughts are raging, now my mind and not my motions, my emotions are the tempest. Emotions, motions out of the self. Certainly, because when we smile at something beautiful the disposition towards pleasure; and we run screaming with daggers in our hands at heartbreak. Oh there's no end to this. I could go on, on, on. I want to talk to someone, anyone. I would tell a story, as follows: once there was a very precocious boy. They encouraged him, pushing him closer and closer to the edge of the cliff, until, of his own accord, he jumped off and tumbled down twenty stories into the suit and (finally) the flowers that had prefigured him all along, and it had been expected. What does that story mean? It means that all the freedom I have craved, crave even now, is the enemy of my genius. If I can do anything, I'm the slave of my desire for excellence. The slave of my desire for love. So many slaves, so many desires! Oh what a century for genius! These are the chains of our lust. There is no form! There is no form! I would shout, but my mind is in tatters. Things are calming again. They'll heat up the moment I try for lust. I can't bear lust, there's no way I can bear it. God, why did you give me a dick? But why not! A spurt of cum is worth every anxiety; if only I could bury myself in a beautiful boy and die. The desire for warmth, death, oblivion is suitable and fitting. It's the only truth I know.

Rimbaud

Myths of beetles were crawling in the mud,
Noir on red blood,
And the coconuts were jangling to the breezes,
Freezes of autumn
Were flowering by the amygdallic gems
Some sculptor must have carved
By living notes.

There was no sculptor, soul,
O million dreaming wings,
There was no scraper, sole
Travail of constant things.

Travel was life, whether he touched
The blue Floridas or crinkled leaves of fresher hue
Between fine fingers; he gawked
At the rushing avalanche of dreams, flowing up
By the vague eye, or down
With a swift grin, or
Sometimes palaces rising up like placards
Of gold, immense vagaries of emerald, the shining spirit
Of the sun crowning the jewel dripping nard of his locks, but
There were also peaks rising into the air like celestial
Fantasies, phalanxes of purple fallacies, and fragrant
Phalli. He sucked
The tips of roses; the sweetness of scents
Became the ardor of his veins, his heart in flames
Fluttered beautiful fans, and plunged into the breasts
Of high calamities, geographic mirscopicities, and villes
Of vile bouche. Kissing mouths meant nothing to him,
But he moved on, through the blue triumph of sorrows,
Through the raging gold, tunneling under the mountains,
Letting whole hues of grandeur fall into riches,
Until he came to the peak of escape. Some people do whistle
In prayer that the peak of escape is salvation, others
Nothing but grim death, but there are those
Who confront all creation, and slashing the long makeshift
Glasses of baubled urns, the rising bubbled clay
Laughs, laughs at the sunset, the dawning end of day!

Hear Me

It's painful to die,
And I should know,
Because I've died
Nine or ten times.

You should learn
Death's face:
Stretched taut
As rubber, sharp
Like a hook,
That sawed off chin,
A piercing eagle's
Nose, spacious
As a pelican's mouth
For the goldfish

Gutted and
Skinned, seared
By his breath --
Though death's
Not all grim eyes
And frowns, but his smile
Is an eclipsed shadow,
Strangled solar
Loons

Black -- to be sure --
As cocoa, that grin
With the succor of death:
A sweetness of sleep,
Heavy limbs,
Drooping eyes,
The nostalgia
Of becoming,
Of giving up.

To men I say
Don't fear death:
Each death
Is a passage
From lichen
Through twilight
Into new
Cerebral labyrinths;
Each craft
Is the structure of ages'
Purple patterings,
Winking fools.

Don't fear death,
For we are dying
All the time,
Seeping
In every place
Where limbs
Drop off, faces
Wrinkle, books
Decay, and flesh
Becomes ugly,
Intelligence
Rots.

Where is it all going?

The passage of time
Is as inevitable
(And perhaps prefigured in)
The tides.

It's painful to die,
And I should know
Because I've died
Nine or ten times.

You should learn
Death's face:
Long, sharp
And angular,
Like a hook's bait
For the goldfish,
That same sawed,
Curving nose.

Gutted and skinning,
Cooking flesh,
But death's not all
Grim eyes
And frowns
Like an eclipsed
Shadow.

There are
Fields of rosy
Dew, the due
Of honeyed
Streams -- black
To be sure
As cocoa is
A sweetness in death
Of sleep,
Tired eyes,
Heavy limbs,
Nostalgia;
Of becoming,
Of giving up.

Each death
Is a passage
Through tunnels
Hanging heavy with lichens
Into new
Cerebral labyrinths;
Each craft
The construction
Of ages,
Purple patterings,
Of the fool's
Horrified
Grin.

To men I say
Don't fear death,
For we are dying
All the time,
In every place
By the seeping
Detergent of laundries,
By the churning
Dryers of streams,
Over coffee,
Disappointments
To a friendly gaze;

Don't fear death,
Because limbs
Drop off, faces
Wrinkle, books
Decay, and flesh
Becomes ugly,
Intelligence
Rots.

Where is this all going?
The passage of time
Is as inevitable as
(And perhaps
Prefigured in)
The tides.

UN ANE AUX CIEUX

Un âne descendait au galop la science.
— Quel est ton nom? dit Kant. —Mon nom est Patience,
Dit l'âne.

*****

Granted that true beauty is to be apprehended only in the lofty reaches of philosophy, whose somnolent towers are wrapped about in the apparitions of funneling language, and granted that the ascent is always more difficult than the descent, as long as the laws of gravity hold, I tripped on a rock on the way up the peak.

-- O rock! I said -- Diamonds and fanatic rubies, you who are stained with my blood -- and I called the tempests to me, and the churning winds, and I cracked my scepter against the rock harder than Aeolus or Moses, so that for days this echoing cry filled the mountains: You mean nothing!

Now the heights might be impassable, fogged up with glass as they are, to mere mortal minds, and I don't know if, from those surpassing cliffs, one can see the tips of archipelagos sumberged in the structure of floods, depths extending to summits unknown; or if a shroud of hyperluminous darkness cloaks every star in the gyring genesis of eternity; or if that rock is as endlessly finite and brittle as the perfidious and tottering point of my fall...

What I do know is that life, for all its extravagance, perceives an end, and in this ending, if one can grasp it, is the apex of the whole rocky structure, as if one could embrace slopes of crystal by fastening to their innermost bulwarks, or something like the play of light. Here is not a record of my travels, but an allegory of my defeats, and I leave it to you, God, whose manifest existence I might doubt, to unknot the twists, tie up the ends, and resolve the solvent bits into a single thread. Then, if you can lead yourself out of the darkness, then, if you can shape trees and majesties, then, if you can brush a woman's face lighter than gold, I will proclaim you a master of painting, and hand you my share of the games. Lector intende: laetaberis.

It really all comes back
To the Jews, you know
The solitary garden,
Twilight, and the Torah,
Beaming moon in midnight skies:
The witching hour
Stirs with no known breezes
In the parallel alley
Ways perpendicular
To a poetry of pure philosophy, extending
Into boundless space.

Sonnet by Moonlight

Vritur infelix Dido totaque uagatur
Vrbe furens

When the solemn arch of the lamplight, pierced
By the first, reckless gleam of the day, gutters
And collapses into a dark fog, thick and foul,
Whose acrid, desirous murmur dispels

Through the passionate air like my longing
For sleep's fragrant peace,
Another urge, secret
And rich in fertile chants

Reaches into my heart as deep as the fresh air
That tickles my nipples, and I swear on an errant word,
Some idle phrase, lost in a vagrant dream;

And somewhere a wind whips the dancing trees
Into a frenzy of unseen music, the sun boils over
Like a bloodshot eye, and the blue sky...freezes.

Love in a world of words,
Child of Africa,
Is yours, so black
When the wind bites your lips
Playfully,
A little by the golden boughs
Dripping with marigold scents,
Hanging with the first ripe
Blossoms of fruit, the season's.

O would that her hair
Fell down twilight in such
Rope! Would that her chasm eyes
Swallowed me! You know me,
Traveler, and you know what I want.

Little black boy,
Little child of Africa,
You are so sad. Conversations
Carried in libraries,
Through ember computer
Terminals are nothing of harvest.
Aren't the people singing there?
Don't the women gather up,
In thick limbs,
Wonderful juice staining,
Skin-seeping peaches?
Don't the men lift up full heaps
Of grain with muscular arms?

When she's dancing
She doesn't notice me. You
Awkward the streets of Portland
With caramel shudders at every flesh --
How you could kiss them
For the cream of her lips!

There is no harvest then?

Oh only the weeds have harvests
And the dark storm seasons,
Amid the black inkwells of stars.

On Reading Gerusalemme Liberata

For every hand that grips the sword
With knuckles white,
With poking bones, taut tendons strained
Against the flesh
In frosted fury through to break
Just like their swords
To pierce a shining plated breast
Insignied gold
To muscled folds of olive skin
That burns beneath:

Blood, savage blood like rubies' blaze,
Reddens to catch
The sun with wicked gleams, flows down
In liquid streams,
Purples to oceans, lakes of tears,
While maidens dream
In heavy pommelled haze of lands
Whispering breezes,
Loves that fall like cherry blooms long
As it pleases
Stretching fields of dewy grass, buds
T'unfold, to burst
Unchilled, in untouched winter passes.

Ears singing to ears...

More Notes Towards an Anatomy of Poetry

I

Poetry must be philosophical:
A king said
Edicts, written in gold and silver
What gold?
Glimmering lakes of midnight?
Silver? Horses, streams of mist:
Streams and oceans, lakes, rivers,
A partage of mountains and land.
So we have:
Earth, heaven, and hell, joined
By the lapping water
(Solitary diadem of crowns)
Under the open sky. The open sky?
Universe extending to eternal
And eternity. What? Shore and sea
If you understand: no rhymes,
Philosophy dissecting the anatomy of life.

II

Of a life. Now we have the dramatic.
Not the dramatic per se.
The paratactic; when we say
Synechdoche, none of that:

On the lamp-lit stage
By the falling rush of angels
Three rolling eyes hit the cue
Of the pool balls.

It was felt all along! Now see
How misperceptions can disturb you?
Unrest, unrest, and the cities of gold!

III

We mention gold again:
Golden crowns, golden thrones, golden stones:
As if they were all assembling
Into some elaborate apparatus, in which
The combined pilgrims of joyous exclamation
(Make no mistake about it
Dressed in red)
Might wash their hands in the holy streams.

IV

Streams, rock; sky, earth, and the mixing reflections
Of clouds. All a singular benediction.
Poetry must be literate, and not beyond but above
All human beings. Pleasure!
The eternal poetry, how can it have one writer?
Puns ruin the justice of it, and when the sky, collapsing
Pours forth past the cracks of the jewel encrusted firmament
The floods of "Noele sur la terre" (so to speak)
And not the last deluge, where will the holocaust be?

V

It really does come running back
All to the Jews, the solitary garden,
The twilight of the midnight Torah.
When will there be a poetry without mysticism?
We said a poetry of pure philosophy?
You know if space is boundless
The words echo eternally.

Before I begin
Some remarks about poetry
Is neither form nor feeling
But the congealing
Medium between, fit
(as Milton says)
Through the protracted drawing
Of a sense, from whence
Rhythm and harmony,
For meaning
But neither in philosophy
Since taylors sit
Their subjects on
A golden throne and hone
All types of sophistry.

Run, Barbaros, to the foundations of the forbidden city; run, in motley,
To the anchors of the foundless ships;
The long walls lay in crumbling splendour
The omens of their grim surrendur. By palaces of plenty
Forgotten of the iron dragons, through the sagging fields
Of pidgeons, renewed in their severally hinter-flights,
Emanate a winter's blight: of what kind
Cross and battered, with the trappings of mountains
And grinning hollows -- of what kind lost and slathered
In the dew of molting hemlock turds? The squeezing birds'
Ineffable delight, the vistas of expansive sight, all while your right
To the blaring drums and the beating horns
Collapses, while the slabs and slashes
Of our spectral beauty lap
The ruins of the slapping sea.

Hymn to an Adonis, Ocean Most High

Things burning slowly by the rudder
Hum distinctly through the streaming
Beats, transcendent sea; rapid silence
Descends softly and lowly as webs of gauze
Through poplar trees; time
And the sieves of twilight
Mix with the powders of midnight dew
For tantalizing dreams.

A witch will brew the potion, stirring
Bubbling bulks of meat with fish's eyes,
And whisper coarsing lies
Under her bearded breath.

Seth, the muscular undulations and the cool
Administrations of the balm, a rising hulk
Of tender arms and all the mounting flowers
Boulder storms to whip my sail, toile the rails,
Smash the knell of the blue machine
To a lichen cove:

Smooth your lips, and soft the down
Of breezes, while like a quivering toy
The keel moves where it pleases
Fertile brows to arch with joy --

Climb triumphing towers through the wisp-light dawn
With the flight of birds, whose gold tails sip
Of ruddy marigolds, near glittering crystals
Sold by the hanging chimes with all the bawds
Of maritimes: for the ocean is my lover's breath
Of hurricanes and tattered cargo; all I ask
Is come ashore before the death of this embargo.

Manifesto

I have found it --
The poem being.

What is the poem being?
A mode of display,
Loops of language
Coruscating
Into congregating
Idols, the symbols
Of her electric face.

Here is the shine
Of beautiful lips
Forming the tips
Of beautiful words!
Words not, indeed,
Fragmented, pieces
Torn from linguistic
Fadaises,
But the spoken, the true
And the true, not spoken
But red.

When?

When the valleys are embodied
In promises,
When lyrical lilts
Come to their own
Green being.
Then the oceans
Will not separate
But agregate
Into a poetry seen.

Meanwhile, watch
How the poets dissolve
Like drops
Sublimate in salty streams,
While taste
Bleeds sallivating sips
Of clear dyeing slime;

Watch history
Melt
Like butter
Of clear
Days
Into a dusky
Philosophical glaze;

Then raise towers of triumphs
To the ground, and raze
The burning towns:

The clear smoke
Of a raining flame
Blurs
The line from heaven to hell.

Manifesto

The poem being:
When is the poem being?
A mode of display,
Loops of language
Coruscating
Into congregating
Idols, the symbols
Of her electric face.

Here is the shine
Of beautiful lips
Forming the tips
Of beautiful words!
Words not, indeed,
Fragmented, pieces
Torn from linguistic
Fadaises,
But the spoken,
The true, and the true
Not spoken, but read:

When valleys are embodied
In promises,
When lyrical lilts
Come to their own
Green being,
Then the mountains
Will not separate
But agregate
Into a poetry seen;

Meanwhile watch
The poets dissolve
Like drops
Sublimate in salty streams,
While the taste
Bleeds sallivating sips
Of clear dyed slime;

Watch history
Melt
Like butter on a clear
Day
Into the dusky
Philosophical haze;

Then raise the tower of triumphs
To the ground,
And raze the burning towns:

The clear smoke
Of a raining flame
Blurs
The line from heaven to hell.

Sing, women of the orient; begin the seaside lay:
Daphnis proached his black lips to the flute
And let a savage note against the ocean spray
Past all the gods of salt to soothe.

Sing, women of the orient; begin the seaside lay:
The ripples gathered by the running shore
And danced like bacchante maidens in their sway,
The coconuts all scattered, palms betrayed.

Sing, women of the orient; begin the seaside lay:
Nerea rose from rosy depths and dressed
Her braids in veils of swarthy gray,
And 'tranced, with equal tones she hymned the blessed.

Sing, women of the orient; begin the seaside lay:
"Galatea, over the far, curved rocks, the trays
Of the slopping tide, bind the seashells in your hair,
Hide lest the red eye catch you, Galatea."

Sing, women of the orient; begin the seaside lay:
"O Kuclops, Kuclops cloaked with sheep that brayed
Their slaughtered limbs for hungry mouths, in your lair
Forebear to slobber with those bloody teeth, O Kuclops, Kuclops."

Sing, women of the orient; begin the seaside lay:
"Galatea, strum your harp with the fine music that lays
The winds through the pithy pipes, impair
The living coral with your feet, and set the flame to sleep, Galatea."

Demure, my muse, demure the woodland pipes:
Eo, Eo, for while the western lights
Blazed azure in the sky
The burning eye was singed in sleep, eo, eo.

Demure, my muse, demure the woodland pipes:
The greedy shepherds on the hill, eo, eo
Tore the mass and ripped the deep
Eo, eo, and feasted on the fleshy thief.

Demure, my muse, demure the woodland pipes:
"You watched, Galatea!" round the dancing rocks
Came Daphnis' cry, by Nerea
"You watched, you watched!"

Demure, my muse, demure the woodland pipes:
And Nerea slipped through the crystal waves
While Venus watched, and Daphnis
Tumbled on the music of his staves (you watched, Galatea!)

Demure, my muse, endure the quiet night.

La Flaneur

Where is he? The wanderer
In the heart of the city,
Not the valleys?

By the blue, cold ridge
Of streets instead of flowers,
By the marine bridge

Of somnambulent towers,
Where the alley-docks flow
And the glass rubble grows.

Deserted Farm 1909: Oil on Fiberboard

Thick, rough, and course round the rugged,
Claws reaching out for the mauve
Of the moonlight,
Dominates gently the pinking clouds.

How long can the old house
Haunt here, ancient chalk streaks
By the dirty grass?

As long as the windows
Like their squinting eyes, and the door
Loves a gaping mouth.

Shuffle in and feed on sweat, the bare
Cool rocks are silent,
Watching for their rusty pores.

No seeds could crack
This desolation, and the lunatic pimples
Splatter on their pocking, leafless
Arms.

Alchemy

Happiness
Floating slowly on the downtrodden grass,
Sodden with storms? The rage flash
Of loneliness, the acerbic swerve
Of a matinal, the clarion bell
On the bird fented stone. Walk
Through the folds of deliberative colors,
Uncreased and flying
Into the silver clappers of the sky, know
That all these make for a handful
Of rippling lakes;

Uncarved statues in the dawn?
In the evening, when the moon is whittled down
To a bone, picked clean by the carrion birds
Of thrill, and locked by a turn of grief:
In the long rows of the graves,
Who will see you?
In the strong groves of a haze
The violets bloom, wishing-full violets,
And the azure clods.

But not to worry of the trumpet:
This brass is gold.

Glutted with time, reeling, having consumed
The days and drunk the fickle nights
Down to their rollicking, ashen dregs, the moment
When dawn floods the horizons with her crisp sunlight
And the towers reveal themselves like gem-clad
Green monstrosities, I strayed on my course
Of rhymes and guttered into a deepness.

Visions tickled the extremities of my lashes
And ductile pipes like a tapering, flow
Of the just altered image of flames, the central core
Of pure white mixing with a blue flight that flits
To the textile corners of memory and takes
The long shape of the mistress moon.