The yolk went down my leg
Like a beautiful snail without a shell,
Went down the hill
To the skillet of water, to the nymphflies,
Into the lips of pond minnows,
Down the long belly of the gar – the hellbenders
Having dived and lost, then into
The paw of the lame panther
Who loped back to her lair with it.
As for the white, it stayed with me,
Mark of the beast, birth, and trade.
After the fierce midsummer all ablaze
Has burned itself to ashes, and expires
In the intensity of its own fires,
There come the mellow, mild, St. Martin days
Crowned with the calm of peace, but sad with haze.
So after Love has led us, till he tires
Of his own throes, and torments, and desires,
Comes large-eyed friendship: with a restful gaze,
He beckons us to follow, and across
II. Conversion
I like to be stationary.
— Bartleby
Who is not a wild Enthusiast
in a green meadow
furious and fell
Arriving on the stage of history
I saw madness of the world
Stripped of falsification
and corruption
anthems were singing in Authorem
Father and the Father
by my words will I be justified
Autobiography I saw
D: The Dreadful Dinotherium he
Will have to do his best for D.
The early world observed with awe
His back, indented like a saw.
His look was gay, his voice was strong;
His tail was neither short nor long;
His trunk, or elongated nose,
Was not so large as some suppose;
His teeth, as all the world allows,
Her arms around me — child —
Around my head, hugging with her whole arms,
Whole arms as if I were a loved and native rock,
The apple in her hand — her apple and her father,
and my nose pressed
Hugely to the collar of her winter coat — . There
in the photograph
It is the child who is the branch
We fall from, where would be bramble,
Brush, bramble in the young Winter
With its blowing snow she must have thought
Was ours to give to her.
At dawn, down in the streets, from pavement grills,
Steam rises like the spent breath of the night.
At open windows, curtains stir on sills;
There’ s caging drawn across a market’ s face;
An empty crane, at its construction site,
Suspends a cable into chasmed space.
God save America,
My home, sweet home!
We are not hostages, America,
and your soldiers are not God's soldiers...
We are the poor ones, ours is the earth of the drowned gods,
the gods of bulls,
the gods of fires,
the gods of sorrows that intertwine clay and blood in a song...
We are the poor, ours is the god of the poor,
who emerges out of farmers' ribs,
hungry
and bright,
and raises heads up high...
Psychoanalysis
always looks for the egg
in a basket
that has been lost.
* * *
I sample sin as if it were
the beginning of well-being.
* * *
I don't like Paradise
as they probably don't have obsessions there.
* * *
If God absolves me
he always does so
for insufficient
evidence.
I
The most devout long to breathe the dirt's scent once more.
The cat runs faster at night; he sees you better.
Only the ordinary is reprehensible, but praise disgusts the just.
Wine is not drunk enough.
Be bitter but only about the Truth.
With a friend, poison is sweet; sweetness, with an enemy, poisons.
The colder things are, the slower, unless they are flowers.
You will never know the river wets your hair.
What is sweetness, that bees do not remember honey?
Work is wings.
II
