The hemlock stick keeps its christmas
of mid-summers:
fox-brush and fish-tails of fir,
the demoniac bead of the juniper,
building the weathers of Norway, like the cone and its hackle,
in formal explosions, matted starling feathers,
whose green is not strange to us;
we have wrecked
with this whale and his bill-hook before. The bough
sets a luminous spinnaker
on the sleeping bitumens,
and tacks through the glosses and gums, like a prow.
Beneath-all a summer’s disaster:
the conifer breathing through gill-slits,
a pin-wheel of star-fish.
The spars
of the hemlock sway upward, where
deep in the resin and sea-tackle,
the wrack of leviathan stirs.
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