62
PARTISAN REVIEW
Cowboys are riled and beautiful with wounds;
Plummet to earth hyena-men from Mars;
The princess in delicious torture swoons;
And a blonde the nazis know -with tapping hand
Panics the sanctum of the high COID.Jlland.
A college too: for boys and popeyed scholars
The virgin tables of all knowledge lie:
The roisterous decalogue of sport or sex
Or how to dance or in five lessons fly.
For deeper mind, the planets' knowing codes
And what the dragon of the zodiac bodes.
Mont Saint-Michel of pulp on every comer
Climbing the sky, vermilion, gold and green,
Is shrine of our ideal and perhaps holy,
The taste of God being rank and absinthe-keen:
His favorite toy the lamb with broken spring;
His favorite singer the adulterous king.
Legarde S. Doughty
STREET SONG
It comes no more an opiate kindly borne,
Like a rose through a whey-lit hall,
By matronly ghost decorously forlorn
And deftly personal.
I tell you death comes now impersonally.
There is no rueful whisper in the ear,
No inference of pause, no dignity;
Just a sound and a smear.
No cousin listens for a final word
At medicinal bed for long remembering.
Death comes street-smelling, vulgar, brash, absurd,
Just as you speak some humdrum, casual thing.
Later someone sends a boy to tell
The sexton what dark hour
to sound
the bell.
