My gun, the color of winter rain and thunder,
Is algebra, poetics, and love’s image.
All which a tired soul would and cannot, this is.
Is algebra in steel, neat ruin’s formula,
Equation of fire and wind and luminous heaven,
Excitement cold as diamond is, and graver.
Poetics: is a tension tamed and waiting,
Emotion’s boulder on a needle balanced,
Lightning confined and made a star in orbit.
Love’s image too: a terror of fire and motion
Made gentle to the palm. Be rash and vex it:
It flashes out immediate death-that answer.
Pollute it with a loose and Judas finger
And it will bear the print (shy steel anemone),
Conceive a rusty cancer and die inward.
Softness it hates. Let stricter hands attend it,
It answers with a double love. In our time,
No man is like to find a steadier fellow.
Therefore my heart (the lover of song and girls once)
Having surveyed the season, takes a new friend,
Binds at the belt a rare and terrible angel.
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