Excerpt
THINGS
The scent of soap
As she went by
Lent me hope;
I cant say why.
And the little laugh
In the young mans eye
Was fully half
Of the blue of the sky.
Are these things things,
Or nothing at all?
Whats a thing?
What it recalls?
• • •
ALBA MINE
Now nights abandoned diamond mines
Been dynamited open, love.
Crickets creak like weakened timbers.
Waken now in a vein of love.
Love, the slick on the eastern seas
Meniscus now is red again,
Is upward suns unbreaking egg
Bled together and round again.-
Again the mountain-crumpled moons
Losing pressure in the black tree,
And now its just invisible,
And now is breeze in the black tree-
A button at your open throat-
A button at your loosened sleeve-
A kiss crushed and all red
And roar of the sun in a slipped sleeve.
• • •
A POT OF TEA
Loose leaves in a metal ball
Or men in a shark cage steeping,
Ideas stain the limpid mind
Even while its sleeping:
Ginseng or the scent of lymph
Or consequences queasing
Into wide awareness, whence,
Like an engine seizing
Society remits a shudder
Showing it has feeling,
And the divers all have shaving cuts
And the futures in Darjeeling-
Blind, the brain stem bumps the bars
Of the shark cage, meanwhile, feeding,
And the tea balls cracked, its leaves cast
To catastrophic reading:
Ideas are too dangerous.
My love adjusts an earring.
I take her in my arms again
And think of Hermann Göring,
And all liquidities in which
A stain attracts an eating,
And of my countrys changing heart,
And hell, where the blood is sleeting.