The Giantess

three poems

THE GIANTESS

Idleness gilds an encompassing giantess

Who lies upon the heavy land of torpor.

Her yellow flesh, empty in indolence,

Poisons desire; she is mordant and depraved.

I have walked upon the golden stones of time

And fallen on her lurking on the hills.

My senses shrink within her slow, brutal languor.

She holds a sullen summer smile of lassitude.

She draws the spirit down upon the stones

And makes it as a gorged and sleeping snake,

Monster of disuse, elongate in her charms,

Where time is working its worn dreamlessness.

She moves in slowness of a long caress

And mauls the future. Languid and primeval,

She sucks evil away in one vast innocence,

And holds her victim mindless like a night.

Such hours of leaden torpor in her arms

Control an elemental misery;

While senseless of her flesh, her sensual power

Corrupts the longing and the love of death.

She is the mood of land-gone sailors when,

Their copra hoisted out at hot Copan,

They seek the thatch of love, and hope, but find

The girls are gone, never to return again.