Sermonic
Beauty ignores dust, plus everything bare
Or bitter. What is dressed in dust is dead—
As is flesh that’s pithiatic. Beauty
Favours succulence, not desert, not ice.
(Hell is coffins—beings gone to scraps, scrapings
Of dirt. The dead are glorified Decay.)
I favour our jolly rooting—rutting,
Truculent, that unbuckles Luculence.
We cavort in sunlight and sport in shade.
Our conjoint flesh—disjoint in counterpoint,
Is appropriately tidal, fluxing,
For Sympathy begins in Rivalry.
This sonnet must protest Mortality:
Love is Beauty’s Immortality.
Horseplay
Galloping in the sheets, you rode me well.
Your haunches’ ornament, I was well worn—
Like a saddle, then worn out: a studhorse.
As stable—or as unstable—as sand,
That’s us, as you buck or I stamp, or snort,
My nostrils flared. I’m crucified in sweat
Once we subside, til I’m stabled again.
If I am steel, you are sinuous—silk,
As strong as steel; your reins are demanding;
Our two forms surge, rococo and raucous.
Our bodies pace—iambic, trochaic,
Anapestic, dactylic, spondaic,
But never pyrrhic, no, not until death.
In Malta
All-conquering, August sun batters down
As hot as a sauna. Malta blazes
Like molten stone; is dull like stone. We meet
A daily summer, all torrid amber.
Sad winds, panting, make no difference—or shade.
The fiery sky suits each heart that’s dry stone.
The heavens—molten gold—saunter and burn.
Our somber thirst coughs up a desert sea.
Drinking breezily, we down pounds of wine
To pacify this thirty-degree heat,
Where dust is—no miracle—instant fire.
In our cool sheets, we cry out as if scorched,
Only then have we blissful shivering,
And gasping atonement, and sweat that’s rain.
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