Chez Cythera

Closer than hair, and of the air, air's bruit,

Its tangled troubles and its sexless hate

Reach us, who do not wait.

Exiled automatically, sickly animal,

We ravish things and distance, but not love

That falls, finally, from above.

Yes, finally! For it falls. Senseless our look

On it and its disguised, anonymous leaf:

Its blind, sleeping grief.

But the breeze kisses the ear. If you don't believe

The breeze does that, die. Then you might as well:

The god of the truth is in hell.

On the contrary, Cythera is everywhere.

That bland curl and lips, color of shadow in gold,

Blood by the soft, crescent-fold ;

Garment and stitch, bone, image of the drinking eye:

Highlighted velvet, heart staining indelibly

All but the most frozen sky.

Extravagant simplicity and the earth!

Those laws-nudity in its endless layers,

And a sense of being players;

An openness to that quantity, the carnal body

That snares the beast, imagination,

Giving sensation for sensation.

Ghosts of bells. . . and of song, song's monotone. . .

A lake of illusion as high as our rhyming waists. . .

Watteau is not to all tastes!

Well, neither is love, which is only fascination

Fastened to the most complex, laconic object: her

Or him, vulnerable to Blur.

Prime dolls! Cythera's queen made and remade maid,

And the sacred bridegroom's exact quiddities-

"Name, please!"-and all the oddities.

Cythera: our groan and boredom is thy little boat,

Our state of want thy license, and our lies

Thy incomputable tax. Death's sighs:

Such puns, paradoxes like that, and the lovely

Open ground that is the orchidaceous throat

We cram with the one silly note,

And wink, unconsciously, and sleep. Consciously.

Simply adoring beauty, holding in a hollow hand

Fat phantoms, a cup, and... .