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: iv


Think only of lime within these elective affinities
Liberated from becoming. In concession, thought lies
Beneath the vaults of past and future men, without
This proud floundering of conceit: beyond, without beyond.
The hilted structures slip bloody through the clock,
Remedy the ethic, and a God is what I am,
My own birth and not my own, but, as all,
The whetstone of an astral blade whose pivot
Cradles me in the matter of its emptiness.

Held by night and the passage of flames
Whose little fervours welcome my tracing eyes
Within the shimmer of this vast, pliable space,
I reverberate with a newness that remains
The constant quarry, though not the quarry;
The very spoke of men whose wonder never fails.
I cannot change, though might my needs,
Or the heavens born by the witchery of calculus.

And all these meet the world with tongues not given to the parley.
But there is no danger from the revering infant who greets
A world that means nothing. Age: the curse of
Definition; babe cast to mould before the slag gives rise.
The burst of buds would share the stellar pregnant
If one gave love to the tin lungs found beneath the
Univocal storms of Jupiter’s dark eye
Or to the coppered kidneys of analogy
Whose Venus’d lips would otherwise give heed
That manly strife will never quell
The eyes or minds of savagery.