Near relatives are weaving, porch to porch,
The tardy wreckage of a thousand lives.
Mind reaches on this suicidal terrace
The bankrupt enmity of friend for friend
Whose shadows knelt on the encroaching sand.
What twist to body twisted there
Is gone; and then it held perfection;
It was the shore worlds broke upon
Before, before but now the air
Mirrors the deadly face of one
Whose big, remembered head once shot
Through seas to tell the summer’s tune,
Turning up always in a dream, –
Is gone. Because the gulls are here
I think the weather is the air.
Like Bedouins we crept into the house
Where records and the cigarettes
Seemed more oasis to our lives
Than sand that lived upon the stairs;
Ours, the absurd security of jazz.
Remorseless change unlocks the hands
That clasped a moment, apart they stay
Each in the orbit of one self;
Unnatural vice, they say,
Was fathered in this paradise.
But we, certainly innocent,
Remember walks in a green land,
The backlog of suburban rides,
The boats anchored in sand;
The salty rummaging of tides.
But even this seems gauche and young
Remembered; and the tongue
Lies for a kiss the heart gives up
And finally success becomes
The grimace on the family lip.
Scenes change, the trains not fast enough;
The colleges repeat a thousand errors
And falsify the final blood
That knows in the essential weakness
Is found the landscape and the love.
Who can recall the first false glance
One night imperceptibly cooler;
Or measure awkwardness of stance
On the heart’s imperfect ruler?
Memory’s end will not commence.
We did not know the curtains hid
The sugar skull of summer
But thought that we had melted it
Into a perfect swimmer
Whose luck was simply what he did.
But like the cat in the butcher store,
So near the center of horror,
Who fondles on his safest fringe
The trap-door of his error,
We too moved toward its center.
For we are left with two such images
The mind repeats and cannot choose
The childhood fragrance of the piano
Or death successful on the plaza.
And both may be chimeras.
At least we know one thing to hold
Against the smirk of shameless elders:
That their contagion was enough;
Disease of which the symptom is
Control of memory through self-love.
Perhaps we cannot ever reach
A rhetoric which is not speech;
And murmur still because, because
Words there are none to speak, no words
But the always fatal mixture of two worlds.
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