Angst
a moment, Delmore. We drank and eyed
the chicken-hearted shadows of the world.
Underseas fellows, nobly mad,
we talked away our friends. "Let Joyce and Freud,
the Masters of Joy,
be our guests here," you said. The room was filled
with cigarette smoke circling the paranoid,
inert gaze of Coleridge, back
from Malta- his eyes lost in flesh, lips baked and black.
Your tiger kitten,
Oranges,
cartwheeled for joy in a ball of snarls.
You said:
HWe poets in our yout h begin in sadness;
thereof in the end come despondency and madness;
Stalin has had two cerebral hemorrhages !"
The Charles
River was turning silver.
In
the ebb–
light of morning, we stuck
the duck
-'s web-
foot, like a candle, m a quart of gin we'd killed.
Robert Lowell
