Avec son dernier soupirantFut soudain frappée, intolérablement,Par le brouhaha irrégulier des oiseauxEt par le désordre des feuillesAffligée par ce tumulte, elleVit les gestes de son amoureux déséquilibrer l’airSa démarche s’égarer, inégaleA travers une rangée de fougères et de fleurs.Elle jugea les pétales en désarroi,La saison tout entière négligée.Comme elle aspirait à l’hiver, alors!Scrupuleusement austère dans…
Speak, speak! Who is it?It is the bowel-pulse, lover of digestibles.It is he who has achieved these syllables.What are these words, these words?They are plopping like mud.O god, how shall I ever clean the phone table?They are pressing out of the many-holed earpiece, they are looking for alistener.Is he here?Now the room is ahiss. The…
Founding father set these lobed, warped stonesTo loom in the leaf-filtered gloomBlack as the charred knuckle-bonesOf a giant or extinctAnimal, come from anotherAge, another planet surely. FlankedBy the orange and fuchsia bonfireOf azaleas, sacrosanctThese stones guard a dark reposeAnd keep their shapes intact while sunAlters shadows of rose and iris —-Long, short, long —- in…
The sea’s collapse.Snowcakes break and welter. This yearThe gritted wave leapsThe seawall and drops onto a bierOf quahog chips,Leaving a salty mash of ice to whitenIn my grandmother’s sand yard. She is dead,Whose laundry snapped and froze here, whoKept house againstWhat the ****tish, rutted sea could do.Squall waves once dancedShip timbers in through the cellar…
Overhead the old umbrellas of summerWither like pithless hands. There is little shelter.Hourly the eye of the sky enlarges its blankDominion. The stars are no nearer.Already frog-mouth and fish-mouth drinkThe liquor of indolence, and all thing sinkInto a soft caul of forgetfulness.The fugitive colors die.Caddis worms drowse in their silk cases,The lamp-headed nymphs are nodding…
The trees stiffen into place like burnt nerves.All night I have dreamed of destruction, annihilations —-An assembly-line of cut throats, and you and IInching off in the gray Chevrolet, drinking the greenPoison of stilled lawns, the little clapboard gravestones,Noiseless, on rubber wheels, on the way to the sea resort.How the balconies echoed! How the sun…
Cried out for the mother’s dug.The dry volcanoes cracked and split,Sand abraded the milkless lip.Cried then for the father’s bloodWho set wasp, wolf and shark to work,Engineered the gannet’s beak.Dry-eyed, the inveterate patriarchRaised his men of skin and bone,Barbs on the crown of gilded wire,Thorns on the bloody rose-stem.
Always from teh pulpit during serviceLeaned the devil prompting you to laugh.Behind mock-ceremony of your griefLurked the burlesque instinct of the ham;You never altered your amused beliefThat life was a mere monumental sham.From the comic accident of birthTo the final grotesque joke of deathYour malady of sacrilegious mirthSpread gay contagion with each clever breath.Now you…
