Here at the Super Duper, in a glass
Supplied by a rill of cold fresh
Running down a glass washboard at one
And siphoned off at the other, and
Perpetually renewed, a herd of
Is made available to the
Who may choose whichever one he
To carry home and drop into boiling
And serve with a sauce of melted butter.
Meanwhile, the beauty of strangeness
These creatures, who move (when they do)With a slow, vague wavering of claws,
The somnambulist¹s effortless
As he crawls over the shell of a
Resembling himself.
Their velvet colors,
Mud red, bruise purple, cadaver
Speckled with black, their camouflage at home,
Make them conspicuous here in the
Day-imitating light, the
Philosophers and at the same time
Herded together in the marketplace,
Except for certain tentative
Of their antennae, or their imperial
Pegged shut with a whittled stick at the wrist.
We inlanders, buying our needful food,
Pause over these slow, gigantic
That spin not.
We pause and are bemused,
And sometimes it happens that a mind sinks
To the blind abyss in a swirl of sand, goes
And archaic in a carapace of horn,
Thinking:
There's something underneath the world.
The flame beneath the pot that boils the water.
