POEMS
Swim undulant to the golden eye of beer,
Standing like wharves, and in their sunken deck
The colored mice collide and flee in fear
As some to their ultimate Thule clicked and tossed
Plunge in the purple bayou, fathoms lost.
Things of all color on the table live:
The nineball is a bronze eel in the moss;
The luminous three like a flamingo flies
In the green sky forever, and still across
The ivory garden rolls the shadow of fate:
That midnight ambulance, the sable eight.
Stricter than merchants of a hard bazaar
The rubber euclids in the cushion lie,
In sinai.flash their forks of anger deal
Law to .all orbits of that carom
sky~
The elegant brow their bitter lightnings vex.
Darkie or drunk is subtler haruspex.
The players lean; the tiny balls like bass
Swim mimic in the mirror of each eye.
Hither we drift from oaths of love or pain,
Forgetting the wings and tracers of the sky,
Forgetting what cueball follows, shaped like a train,
Or a Packard shipwrecked on the curbs of rain.
MAGAZINE STAND
Here gleams the grotto of our lacquered saints.
Their locks are lightning and their eyes a knife.
They and the flooded angels who see God
Alone take straight the stinging scotch of life.
They stride the world, gather with magic glove
War's angry garland or the flowers of love.
Here in the urns and roses of the garden,
Her finger in the rites of nicotine,
Beauty is dreaming in her chlorine tresses,
And pastry angels of the cinema lean.
Here Petty's queen, madonna of the lathe,
Is choired with the naked saints that grin and bathe.
In nickel pots of paper, knighthood flowers:
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