THIRD PROW
A king scattered seed-like if daring to love booed down his whole life roiling in terror
Drunk to the gills beneath the absent deluge
O clarity
Escape ladder of eyes into eyes
Towering timbers echoing the bricked warmth of black snow
The color of cold the warmth at sea
Seed-heave the soft-bodied mollusca these legs mountains echoing high hopes
More divine if daring to level it all the meanderers and maenads left to sizzle in their place
Midnight illuminated to ruins the lace-on-lace of oceanic nether-regions
Bursting at the seams with luster like the rainbowed globe melting at a moment’s notice
Alighting on your obsidian nostrils
A rose-cut diamond spinning
Its amethyst rose and trumpeting
Night’s bronze
Boring through the scolopendral wells of youth
Does it offend? This way? This orifice? May it upend the history of straightness
Stone-fortune feigns the shearing iron
The rings of vanished horses
Waters-turned-roe-deer graze the overthrown kingdom to what ritualistic exchange
Mirror-fowl writhe in flames the doubling-down of lofty crowns
By apanage that star is my castle
Scaling upwards it shimmers to a boil
Rather than a lightness of being which erases not
But pulls the ever-at-the-ready
Abyss ever closer
Step aside flame-spewing nostril
You’re a long way from where my meadow is
Solar quicksilver of absolute glass
Spiraling cornucopias of drunkenness
Listen to me you out-of-breath varlet
You valet to royal steam rooms go on patrolling your sea-wall of anemones
Between the jaws of vowels witness the carnivore extraordinaire
This clearing leads to one wide-open maw
Orders in the air howling to unwound wings you are a tyrant
If to those ground-down we have but throne or crown to show under one thunderous heel
Steel wanes in strength woven through common streets
Obsessed with its own snares
—What if the snows arose on horseback?
—What if the horse was absorbed by the hoarseness of the reeds?
The worn-out summer wears away at the stride
Ensconced at the tail end of one such tête-à-tête
A stone’s throw from the void
A crustacean-like bridge elongated subjugated
By its convulsing valves
Until every star-chart is erased
In the octrois of months to come
Become dense clusters become a trellis of poppies
Why so cold a welcome from these arks
These slumbering summits these honeyed dishes of dreams
This field become cloud become blooms of ancient stone
This inlet the outlet to madness?
O winged bed of sea legs
Smooth over the pearls the rolling spindrift
This day imprinted with a black breeze the dewiness of the void
Haunted retiarius maimed slayer of men
Headstrong the winter steadied into summertime
But was it ready
The sea spray the misting waters were washing the already-besmoked
Island with gold
Wishing to spur the fur-covered forces from their palm trees
Doomed to the marmoreal undressedness of noon
September 1950