PARTISAN REVIEW
The first days have a tang: in a bone cup
Wild honey, locusts, the gracile hermit's lunch,
And goglets cooling among walls; the verb
Of Handel in a starlit attic sounding
The question of how much one ever needs
-Which is high naughtiness in a grave man.
And the ruddy colossus who had guarded you
Moves to a pillar above those crawling sands
In which
his
absence plants the splendor plucked
By late visitors to that place. And only then,
With the last illusion that anything matters lost
Like a bad penny, do such languors come
That, pulled two ways at once by the distant star
Called Plenitude and the bald planet Ebb,
Your body learns how it is chained to fear.
You learn you need one thing alone which, pressed
Against your palate, is not yet joy, nor even
The hope of it. Your body is like a coast
At sunset, whose morbid flats, the blacks and beggars
Straggling with their hideouts on their backs,
Burn like the cities of antiquity caught
For once without the patina of time;
And at full tide, though winsome, still suspect,
Laid on too thick, but (though suspect) held dear
Lest everything fail: lest after Handel stopped
The listening beasts had not lain down appeased:
Or lest, tomorrow morning, when the sun
Bestrides the vineyards, a sick man should pretend
Somehow that of this chryselephantine air
The gold cannot be pity, nor ivory charity.
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