In camel’s-hair, in heather twill or suède,
Plum cordovan with sock of highland wool,
I straggle on the auburn lawns of fall.
Gardeners in blue or russet with slow rake
Curry and prod the swirling aisles of grass.
Their bonfires glow like roses, slowly breathe
A spice of tart cremation on the air
That under despoiled branches, raveling twig,
Glitters, a shallow honeycomb of sun.
The great oaks twitch like horses, hardly move.
Here to imprinted benches, mailbox-green,
Where prospered the red kisses all July
In hollywood décor of bush and moon,
Comes no one now: shade is ambiguous friend.
But life in humming cogs or colored bobbins
Turns like an engine droning at half speed.
God’s zany dust and whims of feather stir:
On toothpick leg the robin broods and rushes;
The sooty pigeon struts on coral toe.
Above, her chromium plumage moulted green,
Some bomber on a strict affair of death.
Even at noon the pondering sun is cool.
The moon is ice-cube bright; thistle and fern
At night are pewter, definite with frost.
Pity the insects in their struck Pompeii,
Queer jewelfolk in the tenements of moss.
A lacquered sphinx or golden locomotive,
Great hoppers waddle, cocked on trigger hip;
Like toads of coal the crickets creep and tweedle;
The nervous ant with ruby-glass abdomen
Swarms on her quartz verandah; with rough clank
The fendered beetles tall as traffic pass.
Some inches up, the quaker wings of moth;
The butterfly’s eccentric bounce on air,
Cathedral panels on a pauper spine.
God’s miracle too: at evening grins serenely
The glowworm with posterior afire;
Mosquitoes prowl the walk with angry muzzle;
Cicadas strum the metal miles of air.
In autumn pity these; the world is ending
For shimmering nations made of glass and song.
I also crawl in sheath of wingless wool,
My brown antennae blowing in the sun.
Image of God. Called man. Thought more than bug.
“And that by whose criteria, sir?”
My own, sir.
Thought is my child and best resembles me.
We do not take a viewpoint, sir; we are one.
The blood-sunk bogs of brain, the human eye
(Spoonful of serum bound with noodle tissue)
We make our absolute Mecca and sole Rome.
What vision in that brain of pipes and lenses
The paper skull of emmet holds, what ethic
Allah korans to fang and ovipositor,
Hard to be sure, but we assume that none, sir.
Man’s pattern of dense bone or blubber hip
Beggars the neat and rainbow choirs of insect;
We by their scale are tumuli of pulp.
Yet every soul on fetish ego doting
Shouts for the great ape, self, as King Criterion.
What lob or gnome the cornea’s portcullis
Admits deformed, we take for emissary.
Accredited, they leer and couple; bogies
Breed in the Doric eave and fierce tiara.
Even the wise are rude and murder fact;
Cramming, they crush it in the rigid skull
Till all the world, their treasure, trips and crumbles.
Restorative perhaps or quiet idyll:
Ponder the bug, within whose chalice heart
Glimmers a love expanding every star.
No parson on that shy communion treads.
And yet, though inner autumn with dank germ
Seizes the flashing landscape of anatomy,
Skull’s grotto, shore of blood, and muscle knoll,
Though April cells are ashen, fall like leaves,
Though faggot bones explode, cry imminent winter,
I wander blind, a preening eyeless human
Tweed-feathered bug and cordovan ephemera.
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