Retroduction To American History

Cats walk the floor at midnight; that enemy of fog,

The moon, wraps the bedpost in receding stillness;

Collects all weary nothings and lugs away the towers,

The pinnacles of dust that feed the subway.

What stiff unhappy silence waits on

Struts like an officer; tongues next-door

Themselves with divination;

I like a melancholy

Beg the nightly pillow with impossible loves.

And abnegation folds hands, crossed like the

Of the complacent tailor, stitches cloaks of

To the backs of obsessions.                            Winter like spring no

Tolerates the air; the wild pheasant meets

The gun; night flouts illumination with meagre impudence.

In such serenity of equal fates, why has

Urged the brook with questions?

Merged with the

Speculation suffuses the meadow with drops to

The cow's gullet; grasshoppers drink the rain.

Antiquity breached mortality with myths.

Narcissus is vocabulary.

Hermes decoratesA cornice on the Third National Bank.

Becomes confusion, decoration a blight; the

In ..

Tennessee stucco, art for the sake of death.

Now(The bedpost receding in stillness) you brush your teeth"Hitting on all thirty-two;" scholarship

The nails of Catullus, sniffs his sheets,

His "passionate underwear;" morality disciplines the

Person; every son-of-a-bitch is Christ, at least Rousseau;

Prospero serves humanity in steam-heated universities,

Thousand dollars a year.

Simplicity,

Flamineo, is obscene;

Sunlight topples indignant from the hill.

In every railroad station everywhere every

Waits for his train.

He cannot hear.

The

Thickens.

Ticket in hand, he pumps his

Toward lower six, for one more terse ineffable trip,

His very eyeballs fixed in disarticulation.

The

Is clean; no elephants, vultures, mice or

Distract him from nonentity: his metaphors are dead.

More sanitation is enough, enough remains:

Do not end lucidities beyond the stint of thought.

For intellect is a mansion where waste is without drain;

A corpse is your bedfellow, your great-grandfather

With you this evening on a cavalry horse.

Connives with heredity, creates fate as Euclid

By definition:

The sunlit bones in your

Are immortal in the titmouse,

They trip the feet of

Like an afterthought each day.

These unseen sunlit bones,

They may be in the

That startles them in

But look at this or

They meet you every way.

For Pelops' and Tantalus' successions were at once simpler,

If perplexed, and less subtle than you think.

Proposes love, love exacts language, and we

Language.

When shall we speak again?

When

The sparrow dusting the gutter sing?

When

This drift with silence meet the sun?

When shall I wake?