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His Exterior

Reader unmov’ d and Reader unshaken, Reader unseduc’ d
and unterrified, through the long-loud and the sweet-still
I creep toward you. Toward you, I thistle and I climb.

I crawl, Reader, servile and cervine, through this blank
season, counting — I sleep and I sleep. I sleep,
Reader, toward you, loud as a cloud and deaf, Reader, deaf

Bartender, make it straight and make it two —
One for the you in me and the me in you.
Now let us put our heads together: one
Is half enough for malice, sense, or fun.

I know, Bartender, yes, I know when the Law
Should wag its tail or rip with fang and claw.
When Pilate washed his hands, that neat event
Set for us judges a Caesarean precedent.

What I shall tell you now, as man is man,
You’ ll find in neither Bible nor Koran.
It happened after my return from France
At the bar in Tony’ s Lady of Romance.

Doubt not
the artist and his age
(though bald as the pilled head of garlic),
married or divorced
and even vying downstage,
are both aware
that God or Caesar is the handle
to the camel’ s hair.

I

The veldt men pray
Carved wood and stone
And tear their flesh
To vein and bone.

The idols scowl
In the brassy sun
Unmindful of
Appeasement done.

Yea, warriors cringe,
Whose tauntings dare
The regnant brute
In regal lair.

As tribal gods
The brave confound,
They bruise their heads
Against the ground.

Kennings of death
Encyst the square,
The mourners drool
And children scare.

Down in the shipyard, day and night,
The Galahads of the dock,
Hard as the sinews of basin rock,
Build an ocean cosmopolite.

The rivets stab and the hammers bite
Into the beams and plates of steel
Of the Diesel heart and the belly keel.

We,
The workers of the world strike catholic notes
On woods and irons, wring from brassy throats
Epics of industry.

The glass door was spinning panes
like an open book.
A suit the color of sky close to night,
wire of eyeglasses a gold moon.

He bowed as if judicial
and called a French name.
Glasses were filled with ice
the color of amber.

We were in America.

He asked me to take his hands.
They are cold, he said.
I warmed his cold hands
as we sat on the rouge banquette.

It was the last May of the century.

Now the summer air exerts its syrupy drag on the half-dark
City under the strict surveillance of quotation marks.

The citizens with their cockades and free will drift off
From the magnet of work to the terrible magnet of love.

In the far suburbs crenellated of Cartesian yards and gin
The tribe of mothers calls the tribe of children in

Across the bluing evening. It’ s the hour things get
To be excellently pointless, like describing the alphabet.

Music: Sexual misery is wearing you out.
Music: Known as the Philosopher’ s Stair for the world-weariness which climbing it inspires. One gets nowhere with it.
Paris: St-Sulpice in shrouds.
Paris: You’ re falling into disrepair, Eiffel Tower this means you! Swathed in gold paint, Enguerrand Quarton whispering come with me under the shadow of this gold leaf.
Music: The unless of a certain series.
Mathematics: Everyone rolling dice and flinging Fibonacci, going to the opera, counting everything.
Fire: The number between four and five.