New Year’s Eve
Staggering homeward between the stream and the trees the unhappy
drunkard
Babbles a woeful song and babbles
The end of the world, the moon’s like fired Troy in a flying
cloud, the storm
Rises again, the stream’s in flood.
The moon’s like the sack of Carthage, the Bastile’s broken, pedlars
and empires
Still deal in luxury, men sleep in prison.
Old Saturn thinks it was better in his grandsire’s time but that’s
from the brittle
Arteries, it neither betters nor worsens.
(Nobody knows my love the falcon.)
It has always bristled with phantoms, always factitious, mildly absurd;
The organism, with no precipitous
Degeneration, slight imperceptible discounts of sense and faculty,
Adapts itself to the culture-medium.
(Nobody crawls to the test-tube rim,
Nobody knows my love the falcon.)
The star’s on the mountain, the stream snoring in flood; the brain-lit
drunkard
Crosses midnight and stammers to bed.
The inhuman nobility of things, the ecstatic beauty, the inveterate
steadfastness
Uphold the four posts of the bed.
(Nobody knows my love the falcon.)
