1
The first point of the shell
was moored to zero but
its mouth kissed one
and paid in torque.
A turbine in the conch
is whirled so fast
that it stands still,
humming with cold light.
2
The animal inside
is out of luck in art.
Tourists gouge him out
of water’s Gabriel
and gild the whirling horn
to make a lamp of home.
The death, a minor surf,
sounds in the living room.
3
(That’s the way it is
with the ugly: ugliness
should arm their flesh
against the greedy but
they grow such wiles
around the hurt
that estheticians come
with love, apology
and knives and cut
the beauty from the quick.)
simply toward some law
we have our image,
father, from the sea:
the sea-bull bellowing
to foul our traces,
dragging us to death
behind disturbed machines.
7
The snail retreats to nothing
where the shell is born,
pearl of its phlegm and rock,
small as water can whirl.
Whorling down the turns
from mouth to point,
it points in vanishing
to university,
where thickened water learned
one graph with nebulae
and turned the living horn
on zero’s variable lathe.
8
It voids the plum, wrack
and accidents of space
and sounds a sea-bull
first ashore. Similar ears,
listening mouth to mouth,
hear it as ocean’s time
and turn into the brain
as mirrors of the maze.
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