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?
