This is the sea, then, this great abeyance.
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How the sun’s poultice draws on my inflammation.
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Electrifyingly-colored sherbets, scooped from the freeze
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By pale girls, travel the air in scorched hands.
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Why is it so quiet, what are they hiding?
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I have two legs, and I move smilingly.
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A sandy damper kills the vibrations;
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It stretches for miles, the shrunk voices
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Waving and crutchless, half their old size.
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The lines of the eye, scalded by these bald surfaces,
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Boomerang like anchored elastics, hurting the owner.
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Is it any wonder he puts on dark glasses?
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Is it any wonder he affects a black cassock?
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Here he comes now, among the mackerel gatherers
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Who wall up their backs against him.
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They are handling the black and green lozenges like the parts of a body.
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The sea, that crystallized these,
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Creeps away, many-snaked, with a long hiss of distress.
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This black boot has no mercy for anybody.
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Why should it, it is the hearse of a dad foot,
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The high, dead, toeless foot of this priest
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Who plumbs the well of his book,
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The bent print bulging before him like scenery.
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Obscene bikinis hid in the dunes,
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Breasts and hips a confectioner’s sugar
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Of little crystals, titillating the light,
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While a green pool opens its eye,
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Sick with what it has swallowed----
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Limbs, images, shrieks. |
Behind the concrete bunkers
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Two lovers unstick themselves.
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O white sea-crockery,
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What cupped sighs, what salt in the throat…
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And the onlooker, trembling,
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Drawn like a long material
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Through a still virulence,
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And a weed, hairy as privates.
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On the balconies of the hotel, things are glittering.
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Things, things----
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Tubular steel wheelchairs, aluminum crutches.
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Such salt-sweetness. |
Why should I walk
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Beyond the breakwater, spotty with barnacles?
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I am not a nurse, white and attendant,
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I am not a smile.
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These children are after something, with hooks and cries,
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And my heart too small to bandage their terrible faults.
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This is the side of a man: his red ribs,
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The nerves bursting like trees, and this is the surgeon:
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One mirrory eye----
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A facet of knowledge.
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On a striped mattress in one room
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An old man is vanishing.
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There is no help in his weeping wife.
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Where are the eye-stones, yellow and valuable,
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And the tongue, sapphire of ash.
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A wedding-cake face in a paper frill.
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How superior he is now.
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It is like possessing a saint.
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The nurses in their wing-caps are no longer so beautiful;
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They are browning, like touched gardenias.
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The bed is rolled from the wall.
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This is what it is to be complete. |
It is horrible.
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Is he wearing pajamas or an evening suit
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Under the glued sheet from which his powdery beak
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Rises so whitely unbuffeted?
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They propped his jaw with a book until it stiffened
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And folded his hands, that were shaking: goodbye, goodbye.
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Now the washed sheets fly in the sun,
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The pillow cases are sweetening.
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It is a blessing, it is a blessing:
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The long coffin of soap-colored oak,
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The curious bearers and the raw date
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Engraving itself in silver with marvelous calm.
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The gray sky lowers, the hills like a green sea
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Run fold upon fold far off, concealing their hollows,
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The hollows in which rock the thoughts of the wife----
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Blunt, practical boats
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Full of dresses and hats and china and married daughters.
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In the parlor of the stone house
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One curtain is flickering from the open window,
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Flickering and pouring, a pitiful candle.
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This is the tongue of the dead man: remember, remember.
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How far he is now, his actions
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Around him like livingroom furniture, like a décor.
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As the pallors gather----
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The pallors of hands and neighborly faces,
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The elate pallors of flying iris.
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They are flying off into nothing: remember us.
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The empty benches of memory look over stones,
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Marble facades with blue veins, and jelly-glassfuls of daffodils.
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It is so beautiful up here: it is a stopping place.
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The natural fatness of these lime leaves!----
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Pollarded green balls, the trees march to church.
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The voice of the priest, in thin air,
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Meets the corpse at the gate,
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Addressing it, while the hills roll the notes of the dead bell;
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A glittler of wheat and crude earth. |
What is the name of that color?----
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Old blood of caked walls the sun heals,
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Old blood of limb stumps, burnt hearts.
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The widow with her black pocketbook and three daughters,
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Necessary among the flowers,
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Enfolds her lace like fine linen,
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Not to be spread again.
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While a sky, wormy with put-by smiles,
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Passes cloud after cloud.
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And the bride flowers expend a fershness,
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And the soul is a bride
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In a still place, and the groom is red and forgetful, he is featureless.
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Behind the glass of this car
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The world purrs, shut-off and gentle.
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And I am dark-suited and stil, a member of the party,
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Gliding up in low gear behind the cart.
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And the priest is a vessel,
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A tarred fabric, sorry and dull,
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Following the coffin on its flowery cart like a beautiful woman,
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A crest of breasts, eyelids and lips
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Storming the hilltop.
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Then, from the barred yard, the children
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Smell the melt of shoe-blacking,
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Their faces turning, wordless and slow,
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Their eyes opening
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On a wonderful thing----
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Six round black hats in the grass and a lozenge of wood,
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And a naked mouth, red and awkward.
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For a minute the sky pours into the hole like plasma.
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There is no hope, it is given up. |