Aubade (With Eliot & H. Crane)

We will have an open book. The long hands
of new September sunlight, golden fingers
stretching across the desert, desolate
acres, multitudes of empty lifeless miles
unhusbanded, untended, trespassed only
as a means of passage. Eliot maybe, or
Hart Crane, voyager who leapt into the maw
of the ancient salt-beast, fodder for the old
sea-serpent wreathed in sea-weed, he that reareth
an horrid head from the roiling wave whose
eyes are mad with moons and the paeans of gulls;
or back to Eliot whose works are towers leaning
colossal among hovels of modern verse.

An open book, the hot white porcelain
male kiss of coffee on the bitten mouth:
the gnawed labial flesh in tensions that mounted
and turned more strands to the silver of surf: the
gray of twilight round the whorl of the
ear, before the fall of the sun behind
the far away scrim of horizon, before
the silk of night is pulled grandmotherly
over the dozing shoulders of the world.
We want, are wont, to dip our ever-young eyes
In the warm and abluent waters of poetry
before we yawn, before we quietly close
the lid of our book, before we curl
inside the innocuous chrysalis of sleep.


early 90s