Por R. R. and R. M.
By day I had dispraised their life,
Accused foremost their little cheated wives
Whose hands like trailers ludicrously hitched
To husbands, over the graph of business bump;
As often, with my friend, I laughed at them,
All but their young, whose strenuous anarchy
Asked why and promised war.
So of their legal dark of nights
And bed revenge and competent small births
That wall us out of marriage I despaired.
Men brought home hate like evening papers, maids
Longed for their slums, the inarticulate clock
Spoke once, and faces double-locked and still
Turned to the wall to sleep.
I show that fear unearthed their boy.
Into the taut membrane of night like knives
A woman screams, rending with rape our rest;
Bodies are ripped from beds, the snapped dream hangs,
And quick to plunge the torn portieres of sleep
We race soft-running Horror the length of halls.
Ghouls are at every door.
Down in the hostile dark as one
The heavy faces point, close in, take aim,
And hands describe centripetal broad wheels
Through which unseen a wily robber moves.
Voices enlarge, cops clamber from the sky,
Our sudden symmetry dissolves—we laugh.
Nothing is caught or lost.
Yet our emergency is lost,
Which would have naked in the domestic night
Brought us like actual murder to relief.
Boys have mixed blood and kissed to seal an oath;
Boys have an oath; oh, we were close to boys,
The salesman, the real-estator, the clerk and I,
Their enemy, their poet.
Robber, paid agent of our hate,
I kiss my hand to you across the roofs
And jungle of back alleys where you hide.
You with your guns are like a boy I loved
Who was born dead and never had a name,
Who was my very son. Night took him off.
Hard to unlearn is love.
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