The Lobster

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.