The sun is all very well when it rises—then
who minds returning its abrupt salute?
But fortunate the man who still can find

No chest of drawers crammed with documents,
love-letters, wedding-invitations, wills,
a lock of someone’s hair rolled up in a deed,

Pascal had his abyss, it followed him.
But the abyss is All—action and dream,
language, desire!—and who could count the times

Ecstatic fleece that ripples to your nape
and reeks of negligence in every curl!
To people my dim cubicle tonight

It is a legacy of Tuscan skill;
see how the holy sisters, Power and Grace,
sustain this woman’s beauty in a form

Worshipped once, discreetly, by our sires
as Cynthia, the lamp of secret haunts,
and still attended through blue landscapes by

Late in this cruel season when the sun
scourges alike the city and the fields,
parching the stubble and sinking into slums

Stupidity, delusion, selfishness and lust
torment our bodies and possess our minds,
and we sustain our affable remorse

Dreams come now, bad dreams, and teenage boys
burrow into their pillows. Now the lamp
that glowed at midnight seems, like a bloodshot eye,

I prize the memory of naked ages when
Apollo relished gilding marble limbs
whose agile-fleshed originals achieved