Return to Sea-Level

Here the pepper spirals up the trees,

Here rubber, in leafy luxuriance,

Thick shade, and coolness, untroubled

By tiny cups of shell at its base,

And at last the coconut, bending, bending;

And the sea-waves.

Tranquil, looking back at the blue peaks

Clumped with exquisite curls of tea,

Delicate, formal headdress of twisted curls,

Here in the nurseries of the ocean are the whelks

And oysters, at a few fathoms, the worm in their intestines

Growing a shroud of mist,

JOSEPH BENNETT

In which the worm, forever glowing,

Makes of his prison a perfect sphere

Rubbing his planet gently against the nipples of milk-bosomed

women

Who drape the warm red circles of their great-lifting breasts

With ropes and chains of captured moonlight, of tiny solar

systems of milk,

Concealed, in the voluptuous folds of the milk-producing organs

of women.

Pearls in the depths. And on the blue peaks

The hawk eagle. I dive

Down the blue canyons in the dry air.

Toward the gnarled rhododendron, the clumps of crimson heads.

Here the roc carried Sindbad, to a Valley of Gems,

Prowled by clouded leopards.

I am breathless in the thin air

And the blue hills, like giant sapphires,

Sharp-edged, leap to my eyes.

The knives of the hills.

The hills are like great knives.

The whelks suck the juice of the corals

And starfish crack and search the shells.

I am helpless and float in the crackling wine.

The scorpion appears, drifting below;

Gaudy fish rush out of the paint-box.

A devil-shark is hauled to shore,

His pancreas is as large as his liver.

His veined gray stomach is enormous.

We shall eat.

Curled teeth, like the snout of a boar.

And the small, dried people, smelling of excrement;

Wearing a rag.

Coolness of the night, on headlands,

Lamps, on the sea.

Above us the hills, backwards, backwards,

Bringing down the fluids

To nourish our pain of hunger.

The Buddha moves above our heads

With a gilded smile.

He lies upon the ground, on a stone pillow, tasseled;

One hand beneath his ear;

His eyes will not close.

Grey granite.

His right foot moves forward, before the left.

The heart ceases to function.

The eyes.

The hills are of stone, and everywhere

Bear the temples,

And the temples are caves,

Locked in the ridgebone of the island.

The stone is locked, the door is locked.

The tenth incarnation, the tenth form of Vishnu, enters the cave.