II

I found Miss Ordway in a plush repose,
counting the curves pitched in her portly mirrors
by seven bored and pygmy globes.
Her floors
were tourmaline supporting topaz standards.

Moist for the mouthing of mild platitudes,
here evenings passed Venetian glasses
and oak planes through green transitions
Walnut backs diffused her satin cases

She seemed faint, ecstatic
in her parlor sunsets,
stamping her wronged head on an old medallion.

The cisterns warbled the October rain
on afternoons.
We listened into green
designs of gloom like sleepers
" Carl, I feel
ths musings of profuse dim meistersingers. "

Her meanings muffled dark interiors
which were an invocation to the sun.

" We mix with carbonates and corals
on pelagic passes where prawns sail
like passions.
Sea spiders hobble from my hair,
my eyes
shall twinkle into octagons of frost. "

She heard a subway of demotic voices
scoffing at all unmusical dispassions.
Their basses settled into dantesque laughter
while icy faint buffoons professed rich prescience.

She said a lodge of hairless ponderers
would stand in choir while the infant dawns
poured tea to chant the aufklarung of men.

Obsessions died among her sweet liqueurs
and pungent bottles.
She would stir cool coffee
and feel the messengers of void encroach
While swallows chittered in the hush and light
and gulls idealized upon the sea
a band of trumpets called a fierce refrain
for thud of blond divines from Palestine
whose footsteps drowned the ariette of birds.

And when her schoolmen passed like prophesy
and mighty infants, she could not affront
their high detachment with her bungled pathos.

Their white feet were an exhalation
of the lovely sin of death,
but they were bawds.