Classic Poem

1

Dispossessed, arrows of longing, we tender our hands
For love of the other shore.

Templum temporis, pure amplitude
Only minutely diminished by being temporary:

One sunset as sentimental as a Balkan banknote,
Another resembling a really busy beach,

Horizontal echelons, robust with blue plus red
There, there, and there gold-machicolated,

Coronets of sunlight in nets,
A cornet's dwell-time on one note of honey or money.

2

No sun now, and Barbara Marshall
Is barking the backyard to bits
All through her oracular night
Until the guest stars, in no wise standing upon the order
Of their galactic going, take their unreluctant leave;

And she will burn her morning off
With many barkings, preSocratic aloha shirts of basic racket
Cauterizing every silent entity in sight.

3

Dear Barbara: sweetheart: bark my aching mortal back
From Aeneas to Zarathustra and back again:
Aren't you in on every mystery and instinct,
The secrets of animal character, the barbaric past,

The fundamentals of the female temperament,
One's vacant alien bestial taboo piety after death?
Three months ago
You were a foetus, one of fourteen
Lodged inside a single heroine.

4

O my sibylline retriever, golden, cordial — actually
The pup's name is just Sadie.
I imagined all that poluphloiosboiotatotic dadadas
Of the world's one ocean concentered in each paradigmatic decal,

And didn't I just make up all that logico-philosophicus stuff
About Barbara Marshall,
The living girl who swapped throats with a dog?