I
You, the lady of magic affinities,
Know how appetite grows larger on
What starves it. Such lovely days
Are lovely days for love, I could write
And lie. Pleasures, complacencies
Are habits remaining serviceable.
I am tired, yes. But not of you.
Evil arrives in the guise of the pitiful.
The dancers’ synthetic intensity
Blurs the stony difference between
Desire and desire. Today the sea
Is filled with old Elizabethan plays…
Liar! The sunset’s gravity reveals
Antonyms of green-mirrors and delights,
The astrological swan, and others:
Sky-sculptured coliseums, coins, ourselves.
We were. We are. We will not be.
Each river has a town, each town a river;
Along its banks, it palms its treasuries:
Forms of knowledge such as gravel, grass,
Sticks, stones, and light flotillas of the weed,
But up in our houses our nature is to fight
Nature. Lady, only arrive.
II
When we were complacent, it was pleasurable,
But lady, that gravel is not grass on which
You bank your magic affinities
Grown larger on what starved them. I could write
We were ourselves—each river has a town
But evil arrives, disguised and pitiful,
Blurring the difference between the sea
And the remaining sunset.Delight reveals
The swan as a dancer of intensity
Whose antonyms—of gravity and light
Although synthetic, are still antonyms
Of coins whose serviceable habits lie,
Palmed treasuries in coliseum banks.
We fight the lovely days of love, and lie.
Desire is an old Elizabethan play
Stonily indifferent because it was,
And is, and will be other than ourselves.
You know the sticks and stones of appetite
Are not the sky’s astrologies but forms
Of knowledge. Flotillas of light green
House towns of stones filled up, as we retire,
With blurring mirror-sculptures of ourselves.
Lady, nature only arrives.
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