27
Veiled my eyes, ·attending. How can it
be
I?
Moist, with parted lips, I listen, wicked.
I shake
in
the morning
&
retch.
Brood
I do on myself naked.
A
fading world
1
dust, with fingers new.
-1
have earned the right to be alone with you.
-What right can that be?
Convulsing, if you love, enough, like
a
sweet lie.
28
Not that, I know, you can. This cratered skin,
like the crabs & shells of my Palissy ewer, touch!
Oh, you do, you do?
Falls on me what
I
like a witch,
for lawless holds, .annihilations of law
which Time and he and man abhor, foresaw:
sharper than what my Friend
brought me for my revolt when I moved smooth
&
thin,
29
faintings black, rigour, chilling, brown
parching, back, brain burning, the grey pocks
itch, a manic stench
of pustules snapping, pain floods the palm,
sleepless, or a red shaft with a dreadful start
rides at the chapel, like a slipping heart.
My soul
strains
in one qualm
ah
but
this
is not to save me but to throw me down.
30
And out of
this
I lull. It lessens. Kiss me.
That once.
As
sings out up in sparkling dark
a trail of a star
&
dies,
while the breath flutters, sounding, mark,
so shorn ought such caresses to us be
who, deserving nothing, flush and flee
the darknes<l of that light,
a lurching frozen from a warm dream. Talk
to
me.
