My father kept a vaulted conch By two bronze bookends of ships in… And as I listened its cold teeth… With voices of that ambiguous sea Old Böcklin missed, who held a sh…

This man makes a pseudonym And crawls behind it like a worm. This woman on the telephone Says she is a man, not a woman. The mask increases, eats the worm,

He, hunger—strung, hard to slake, So fitted is for my black luck (With heat such as no man could ha… And yet keep kind) That all merit’s in being meat

Midnight in the mid-Atlantic. On… Wrapped up in themselves as in thi… And mute as mannequins in a dress… Some few passangers keep track Of the old star-map on the ceiling…

They’re out of the dark’s ragbag,… Moles dead in the pebbled rut, Shapeless as flung gloves, a few f… Blue suede a dog or fox has chewed… One, by himself, seemed pitiable e…

Compelled by calamity’s magnet They loiter and stare as if the ho… Burnt—out were theirs, or as if th… Some scandal might any minute ooze From a smoke—choked closet into li…

Black lake, black boat, two black,… Where do the black trees go that d… Their shadows must cover Canada. A little light is filtering from t… Their leaves do not wish us to hur…

Enter the chilly no-man’s land of… Five o’clock in the morning, the n… Where the waking head rubbishes ou… Of sulfurous dreamscapes and obscu… Which seemed, when dreamed, to mea…

From under the crunch of my man’s… green oat-sprouts jut; he names a lapwing, starts rabbits… legging it most nimble to sprigged hedge of bramble,