Three Poems from Trilce

This crystal waits to be sipped
in the rough by an upcoming mouth
without teeth. Not toothless.
This crystal is bread not yet arrived.

It hurts when they force it
and no longer has animal affections.
But if impassioned, it would honey
and take the mould of substantives
that adjectivize on offering themselves.

Those who see it there a colourless
sad individual, would send it off for love,
for the past and at most for the future:
if it is not itself given by any of its sides;
if it waits to be sipped at once
and as transparency, by an up-
coming mouth that will no longer have teeth.

This crystal has passed from animal
and now off it goes to form lefts,
the new Minuses.

Just leave it alone.

Who's lit a match!
Tear me hair. I smile
to swing by reason.
I smile even more, if everyone comes
to see the colourless guides
and to me always punctual. Why should I care.

Not even that good Sun who, dying of pleasure,
divvies everything up to distribute it
among shadows, the prodigal,
nor would he wait for me on the other side.
Nor the others who only stop by
entering and leaving.

The great baker calls
with ringing retinas. And we pay in gestures
most curious the warm undeniable value
baked, transcendent.
And we take our coffee, already late,
with insufficient sugar that's been lacking,
and butterless bread. What can one do?

But, yes, the rings reinforced, barred.
Health goes on one foot. Forward: march!

Who would have told us that on a Sunday
like this, on arachnid slopes
the shadow would rear-up as pure frontal.

(A mollusk attacks barren salt-scoured eyes,
roughly two or more tantalising chances
against a half death-rattle of racked blood).

Then, not even the reverse of the uninhabited
screen would dry up the arteries
extradosed with double yet-to-bes.

As if they would have let us leave! As
if we weren't always fæðmed
with the two daily flanks of fatality!

And how much we'd have been offended.
And yet how much we'd have annoyed each other
and fought and made up again
and again.

Who would have thought up such a Sunday,
when, crawling, six elbows sup
in this way, Mondayish sterile yolks.

We would have plucked against it, from under
the two wings of Love,
lustrous third feathers, poniards,
new passages on eastern paper.

For today when we prove that we're still living,
almost no more than a front.