And up these pulsing joyous stairs
they would climb into bed

Crater of the beginning, mud of death,
endless wreckage,
is this your world,
the serpent you forged
over seven long nights?

Sudden September thunderstorm
then long wearisome rains;
still on the beach the fresh
rush of waves;

And suddenly in the street on parade
the exhausted elephants
and monkeys, biggest of buffoons, dwarfs
falsely cheerful, the trapeze artist
who made me want to weep,

When night comes the babies scamper into their burrows,
deep under a moonscape of white plains.

Venus is rising. She’s muttering,
A sober chick is a sullen trick.

So much for the fighting
                                                 and the sex

The facts sit in an ordinary room. They resemble people:
stubborn and without imagination.

They got borne away from home. Or was it to home.
What is home. Is it where they still bear with you when you get carried away.

Save that the curtains, drawn
and held by jagged darts
arrest the light with flecks of gold