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.