two lengthy ones that tonight
have something of mothers who now
deceased each lead through bromined slides,24
a child by the hand.
And only will I keep my hold,
with my right hand, that makes do for both,
upraised, in search of a tertiary arm
that must pupilate, between my where and when,
this stunted adulthood of man.25
[JM]
XX
Flush with the beaten froth bulwarked
by ideal stone. Thus I barely
render 1 near 1 so as not to fall.
That mustachioed man. The sun,
his only wheel iron-rimmed, fifth and perfect,
and upwardly from it.
Clamor of crotch buttons
free,
clamor that reprehends A vertical subordinate.
Juridical drainage. Pleasant prank.
But I suffer. Hereabouts I suffer. Thereabouts I suffer.
And here I am doting, I am
one beautiful person, when
williamthesecondary man
toils and sweats happiness
in gushes, putting a shine on the shoe
of his little three-year-old girl.
Shaggy cocks his head and rubs one side.
The girl meanwhile sticks her forefinger
on her tongue which starts spelling
the tangles of tangles of the tangles,
and she daubs the other shoe, secretly,
with an itty bit of silyba and dirt,26
but only with,
an itty bi-
.t.
[JM]
XXIII
Estuous oven of those my sweet rolls
pure infantile innumerable yolk, mother.
Oh your four gorges, astoundingly
mislamented, mother: your beggars.
The two youngest sisters, Miguel who has died
and me still pulling
one braid for each letter in the primer.
In the room upstairs you handed out to us
in the morning, in the evening, from a dual stowage,
those delicious hosts of time, so
that now we’d have more than enough
clock husks in flexion of 24 hours
stopped on the dot.
Mother, and now! Now, in which alveolus
might remain, on what capillary sprout,
a certain crumb that today perplexed in my throat
doesn’t want to go down. Today when even
your pure bones might be flour
with nowhere to knead
—tender confectioner of love,
even in raw shade, even in the great molar
whose gum throbs on that lacteal dimple
which unseen builds and abounds—you saw it so often!
in closed hands newborn.
So the earth will hear in your silencing,
how they keep charging us all
rent on the world in which you leave us
and the cost of that interminable bread.
And they charge us for it, when, being only
children then, as you could see,
we couldn’t have snatched it
from anyone; when you gave it to us,
no, mama?
[CE]
XXV
Chess bishops upthrust to stick27
to lute, down deep, to napes,
to upright numerators’ undersides.
Bishops and burs from lupine piles.
As the lee of each unraveled
carabel snorts, without amerecanizing,28
blighting ploughtails in spasm slacken,
with the scanty pulse improperly prone
to blowing its nose on the back of its wrist.
And the sharpest sopranancy
gets tonsured, ensnared, and at length
imnazaled29 near icicles
of infinite pity.
Biggity haunches huff hard
to bear, pendent on musty breast plates
standards with their seven colors
under zero, from guano islands
to guano islands.
Hence the honey harvests in the wide open of bad
faith.
Hence the time of the rounds. Hence the man of the back
roads onward to future planes,
when
