Poem-a-Day

What’s that? 
An egg? 
By the brother Boot it stinks fresh. 
Give it to Gillot. 

Galileo how are you 
and his consecutive thirds! 
The vile old Copernican lead-swinging son of a sutler! 
We’re moving he said we’re off—Porca Madonna! 
the way a boatswain would be, or a sack-of-potatoey charging Pretender 
That’s not moving, that’s moving.

What’s that? 
A little green fry or a mushroomy one? 
Two lashed ovaries with prosciutto? 
How long did she womb it, the feathery one? 
Three days and four nights? 
Give it to Gillot.

Faulhaber, Beeckmann and Peter the Red, 
come now in the cloudy avalanche or Gassendi’s sun-red crystally cloud 
and I’ll pebble you all your hen-and-a-half ones 
or I’ll pebble a lens under the quilt in the midst of day.

To think he was my own brother, Peter the Bruiser, 
and not a syllogism out of him 
no more than if Pa were still in it. 
Hey! pass over those coppers, 
sweet milled sweat of my burning liver! 
Them were the days I sat in the hot-cupboard throwing Jesuits out of the skylight.

Who’s that? Hals? 
Let him wait.

My squinty doaty! 
I hid and you sook. 
And Francine my precious fruit of a house-and-parlour foetus! 
What an exfoliation! 
Her little grey flayed epidermis and scarlet tonsils! 
My one child 
Scourged by a fever to stagnant murky blood— 
Blood! 
Oh Harvey beloved 
How shall the red and white, the many in the few, 
(dear bloodswirling Harvey) 
eddy through that cracked beater? 
And the fourth Henry came to the crypt of the arrow.

What’s that? 
How long? 
Sit on it.

A wind of evil flung my despair of ease 
against the sharp spires of the one 
lady: 
not once or twice but . . . .  
(Kip of Christ hatch it!) 
in one sun’s drowing 
(Jesuitasters please copy). 
So on with the silk hose over the knitted, and the morbid leather— 
what am I saying! the gentle canvas— 
and away to Ancona on the bright Adriatic, 
and farewell for a space to the yellow key of the Rosicrucians.

They don’t know what the master of the that do did, 
that the nose is touched by the kiss of all foul and sweet air, 
and the drums, and the throne of the faecal inlet, 
and the eyes by its zig-zags. 
So we drink Him and eat Him 
and the watery Beaune and the stale cubes of Hovis 
because He can jig 
as near or as far from His Jigging Self 
and as sad or lively as the chalice or the tray asks 
How’s that, Antonio?

In the name of Bacon will you chicken me up that egg. 
Shall I swallow cave-phantoms?

Anna Maria! 
She reads Moses and says her love is crucified. 
Leider! Leider! She bloomed and withered, 
a pale abusive parakeet in a main street window.

No I believe every word of it I assure you 
Fallor, ergo sum! 
The coy old frôleur! 
He tolle’d and legge’d 
and he buttoned on his redemptorist waistcoat. 
No matter, let it pass. 
I’m a bold boy I know 
so I’m not my son 
(ever if I were a concierge) nor Joachim my father’s 
but the chip of a perfect block that’s neither old nor new, 
the lonely petal of a great high bright rose.

Are you ripe at last, 
my slim pale double-breasted turd? 
How rich she smells, 
this abortion of a fledgling! 
I will eat it with a fish fork. 
White and yolk and feathers. 
Then I will rise and move moving 
toward Rahab of the snows, 
the murdering matinal pope-confessed amazon, 
Christina the ripper. 
Oh Weulles spare the blood of a Frank 
who has climbed the bitter steps, 
(Rene du Perron . . . . !) 
and grant me my second 
starless inscrutable hour.