“
Now reading
The Drowsy Mesmerist
The baby midnight in the elder brain Cadaver is at once and parent of light As well as the dense bellowing refrain The ears take, partitioning out the night And the wee hours of morning, chubby hands Moisten, retain the universe of time- Ah, when the doubting footprints in the sands Ah, when the breaking booming of the chime Form the ascetic shiftless residue! The garment ruffled O the world's sheer piece Between the flesh and the bright spectral view Of that dancer in the paternal crease. And in the surety of sexless dreams Some horribly impossible fairy-leaf Cradles the infant weight, settles the seams, Prows on some hideous and sea-worn reef. Be, therefore, be outtaken, be updrawn: Weft of the sails and breeze of the sweet father Leaning his face into the fists of dawn Baring, than lashes, fierce eyes open, rather. And then the eye-blue and the fern-like red Of the eyeball, and jerked wind-form of the hair, And the white of the eyeball, dark of head, Then: the same furniture tossed anywhere. O pace the corners dark of the love-brain Where toys mudmuddle the white father-fact As rabid as clock-numerals insane Upon his changeless and unblemished tact! This, for all midnights, is a raging wave Eased of its tension in light-negative only: The breast of the baby climbing from the grave Of its dark bed it finds so deep and lonely. So, as some whisper of the female breast Some damp adornment of the marriage night, Now is the full love of the dusky nest Grown gasping to a ball of friendless fright: Detached, and in the father's arm a ship Blind as a bat of tears ripped from the rain: Lull in his arms, ah the bird of the hip Sleeps, sleeps in rigging of the big-male pain! And as he paces out the morning hours A father sleepless and half driven mad The baby prunes the wide soft thunder-flowers Caught in his father's sail to make him glad.