o
Beasts of Heaven–
In tergalactic flies!
On the scorched grains of Newport
what I wanted
was marriage without a wife,
can you picture?
Now a seabreeze threads the missing
carwindows, hear it?
There are ribbons of blood in the water.
And Pluto, left at the edge, so
wrinkled-saddest and last-
Pluto swallows Mercury
and calls it the Earth.
Robert Long
from
THE SONNETS
22.
Wind dies trying bends. A
Harbor dented her sight.
Next hymn hauls a climbing kite
up through inner-rhyming herons.
All docile islanders
wend churning propellers,
seen dentists were violent,
else wheat hunts a file .
Naming:
0,
halo of flies ...
nothing in the smelling salts,
nothing in the flivver boot.
All is doused, thrown out:
uncles and helicopters,
blooms and bushes.
