The Lilies of the Field Know Which Side Their Bread Is Buttered On
Clear as a bell, the substantial summer night rings with many hymns.
Mindlessly, a million singing insects obey the dictates of instinct.
Nor cloud nor moon obstructs the space that supervenes between each singing thing and each circling star.
Swastika stars, Siberian stars, science-fiction stars. . . . I ought to be in bed asleep. I ought to be in bed.
3:30 a.m., 73┬░. Thanks, clock; thank you, motherly thermometer.
And thank you, insects. You must know a million things, and I may know a million million,
But what is that? What difference could that make
Compared to all of the infinitely subdivided infinities
Deep inside each spontaneous antique atom of your song, each significant air and articulated rhythm, each phrase, item?
A dog, near by, barks once.
A far dog barks in answer, or as though in answer.
(Geckoes' echoes, letter perfect.)
Now they fall silent. A set of insect strings or membranes assumes a new network of music, musics.
Something, truck-like, hums,
Hums lower, then shifts deeper and goes on in a heavy-duty register, far away.
Some mourning dove or owl donates notes to the orchestra's chord. In light pajamas, on our front porch, I wonder what in the world is going on
In the world.
Strolling-while-leaning, one of the cats draws by, putting a lot of confident self-indulgent pressure on the backs of my naked ankles, idly seeking company and pleasure.
Who knows? The sun may not come up at all this morning,
In which case, cat, the lilies of the field will turn out to have been right all along.
The truck's pedal point is heard no more. We were a passacaglia, cat. Retail merchandising made this country great. Light travels light.
I think I would be better off illiterate again.
Reading Freud for hours on end has reduced my dreams to such ridiculous rubble.
Imagine me — also the year 1899 incarnate — at an Austro-Hungarian costume ball sporting a bearded mask of pasteboard
With a bakelite caption, " 1900. " . . . Now that's really dumb.
Well, what an amiable beast of burden I must be, to sit here, an oh-so-sensitive being being oh-so-sensitive,
One petty officer in the ancient and more or less honorable company of the world's poets, composing,
While out there in the Christlike darkness there throbs a country of mortgages,
A vast magnificent civilization founded on retail merchandising,
Every man a middleman, every beast, even, a middlebeast.
I bark a bit myself, inside. The insects' number is beyond me.
Listen: there used to be a verse in the book of Ezekiel,
One of those wonderfully overstated mosaic rhapsodies of gorgeous mockery addressed to poor old ruined Tyre:
The suburbs shall shake at the sound of the cry of thy pilots.
Or words to that effect, something like that, prepositional triads wall-to-wall, hot-and-cold-running alliteration and internal rhymes, Dark Age verb forms.
The verse may be there yet, for all I know.
Even if I weren't scared to death to open that black Jacobean book, though, it would still be too dark to read.
Even so, if starlight, doglight, catlight, buglight, nightlight, whatever, were enough to see by, I would make it out there, in good order,
The twenty-seventh chapter and the twenty-eighth verse: suburbs , pilots , just like now.
And the language so grand that Kipling could speculate that Shakespeare had had a hand in it.
Pilots , not a mile from here at an airport named for a philosophy professor,
Or over yonder where the modern Lebanese are flattening their Tyre again.
But the wreckage and the prophet's mantic number remain beyond me.
Yawn.
They're burning the thermometer at both ends nowadays, and I certainly ought to be in bed asleep.
But something from the Golden Age lodges in my wake. Long ago, when I was a child, able to sleep all night every night,
They used to write scriptures out in sacred radium that glowed in the very dark,
Perfect letters on a lurid blue background with sprinklings of silver.
On an old clock there would glow pea-green hands and numerals, mysterious.
If I should die before I wake / I pray the Lord my soul to take. . . .
They've cut that out now, they've quit all that, for safety's sake, the letters and numerals of faint fire.
Clear as a bell, the substantial summer night rings with many hymns.
Mindlessly, a million singing insects obey the dictates of instinct.
Nor cloud nor moon obstructs the space that supervenes between each singing thing and each circling star.
Swastika stars, Siberian stars, science-fiction stars. . . . I ought to be in bed asleep. I ought to be in bed.
3:30 a.m., 73┬░. Thanks, clock; thank you, motherly thermometer.
And thank you, insects. You must know a million things, and I may know a million million,
But what is that? What difference could that make
Compared to all of the infinitely subdivided infinities
Deep inside each spontaneous antique atom of your song, each significant air and articulated rhythm, each phrase, item?
A dog, near by, barks once.
A far dog barks in answer, or as though in answer.
(Geckoes' echoes, letter perfect.)
Now they fall silent. A set of insect strings or membranes assumes a new network of music, musics.
Something, truck-like, hums,
Hums lower, then shifts deeper and goes on in a heavy-duty register, far away.
Some mourning dove or owl donates notes to the orchestra's chord. In light pajamas, on our front porch, I wonder what in the world is going on
In the world.
Strolling-while-leaning, one of the cats draws by, putting a lot of confident self-indulgent pressure on the backs of my naked ankles, idly seeking company and pleasure.
Who knows? The sun may not come up at all this morning,
In which case, cat, the lilies of the field will turn out to have been right all along.
The truck's pedal point is heard no more. We were a passacaglia, cat. Retail merchandising made this country great. Light travels light.
I think I would be better off illiterate again.
Reading Freud for hours on end has reduced my dreams to such ridiculous rubble.
Imagine me — also the year 1899 incarnate — at an Austro-Hungarian costume ball sporting a bearded mask of pasteboard
With a bakelite caption, " 1900. " . . . Now that's really dumb.
Well, what an amiable beast of burden I must be, to sit here, an oh-so-sensitive being being oh-so-sensitive,
One petty officer in the ancient and more or less honorable company of the world's poets, composing,
While out there in the Christlike darkness there throbs a country of mortgages,
A vast magnificent civilization founded on retail merchandising,
Every man a middleman, every beast, even, a middlebeast.
I bark a bit myself, inside. The insects' number is beyond me.
Listen: there used to be a verse in the book of Ezekiel,
One of those wonderfully overstated mosaic rhapsodies of gorgeous mockery addressed to poor old ruined Tyre:
The suburbs shall shake at the sound of the cry of thy pilots.
Or words to that effect, something like that, prepositional triads wall-to-wall, hot-and-cold-running alliteration and internal rhymes, Dark Age verb forms.
The verse may be there yet, for all I know.
Even if I weren't scared to death to open that black Jacobean book, though, it would still be too dark to read.
Even so, if starlight, doglight, catlight, buglight, nightlight, whatever, were enough to see by, I would make it out there, in good order,
The twenty-seventh chapter and the twenty-eighth verse: suburbs , pilots , just like now.
And the language so grand that Kipling could speculate that Shakespeare had had a hand in it.
Pilots , not a mile from here at an airport named for a philosophy professor,
Or over yonder where the modern Lebanese are flattening their Tyre again.
But the wreckage and the prophet's mantic number remain beyond me.
Yawn.
They're burning the thermometer at both ends nowadays, and I certainly ought to be in bed asleep.
But something from the Golden Age lodges in my wake. Long ago, when I was a child, able to sleep all night every night,
They used to write scriptures out in sacred radium that glowed in the very dark,
Perfect letters on a lurid blue background with sprinklings of silver.
On an old clock there would glow pea-green hands and numerals, mysterious.
If I should die before I wake / I pray the Lord my soul to take. . . .
They've cut that out now, they've quit all that, for safety's sake, the letters and numerals of faint fire.
Mindlessly, a million singing insects obey the dictates of instinct.
Nor cloud nor moon obstructs the space that supervenes between each singing thing and each circling star.
Swastika stars, Siberian stars, science-fiction stars. . . . I ought to be in bed asleep. I ought to be in bed.
3:30 a.m., 73┬░. Thanks, clock; thank you, motherly thermometer.
And thank you, insects. You must know a million things, and I may know a million million,
But what is that? What difference could that make
Compared to all of the infinitely subdivided infinities
Deep inside each spontaneous antique atom of your song, each significant air and articulated rhythm, each phrase, item?
A dog, near by, barks once.
A far dog barks in answer, or as though in answer.
(Geckoes' echoes, letter perfect.)
Now they fall silent. A set of insect strings or membranes assumes a new network of music, musics.
Something, truck-like, hums,
Hums lower, then shifts deeper and goes on in a heavy-duty register, far away.
Some mourning dove or owl donates notes to the orchestra's chord. In light pajamas, on our front porch, I wonder what in the world is going on
In the world.
Strolling-while-leaning, one of the cats draws by, putting a lot of confident self-indulgent pressure on the backs of my naked ankles, idly seeking company and pleasure.
Who knows? The sun may not come up at all this morning,
In which case, cat, the lilies of the field will turn out to have been right all along.
The truck's pedal point is heard no more. We were a passacaglia, cat. Retail merchandising made this country great. Light travels light.
I think I would be better off illiterate again.
Reading Freud for hours on end has reduced my dreams to such ridiculous rubble.
Imagine me — also the year 1899 incarnate — at an Austro-Hungarian costume ball sporting a bearded mask of pasteboard
With a bakelite caption, " 1900. " . . . Now that's really dumb.
Well, what an amiable beast of burden I must be, to sit here, an oh-so-sensitive being being oh-so-sensitive,
One petty officer in the ancient and more or less honorable company of the world's poets, composing,
While out there in the Christlike darkness there throbs a country of mortgages,
A vast magnificent civilization founded on retail merchandising,
Every man a middleman, every beast, even, a middlebeast.
I bark a bit myself, inside. The insects' number is beyond me.
Listen: there used to be a verse in the book of Ezekiel,
One of those wonderfully overstated mosaic rhapsodies of gorgeous mockery addressed to poor old ruined Tyre:
The suburbs shall shake at the sound of the cry of thy pilots.
Or words to that effect, something like that, prepositional triads wall-to-wall, hot-and-cold-running alliteration and internal rhymes, Dark Age verb forms.
The verse may be there yet, for all I know.
Even if I weren't scared to death to open that black Jacobean book, though, it would still be too dark to read.
Even so, if starlight, doglight, catlight, buglight, nightlight, whatever, were enough to see by, I would make it out there, in good order,
The twenty-seventh chapter and the twenty-eighth verse: suburbs , pilots , just like now.
And the language so grand that Kipling could speculate that Shakespeare had had a hand in it.
Pilots , not a mile from here at an airport named for a philosophy professor,
Or over yonder where the modern Lebanese are flattening their Tyre again.
But the wreckage and the prophet's mantic number remain beyond me.
Yawn.
They're burning the thermometer at both ends nowadays, and I certainly ought to be in bed asleep.
But something from the Golden Age lodges in my wake. Long ago, when I was a child, able to sleep all night every night,
They used to write scriptures out in sacred radium that glowed in the very dark,
Perfect letters on a lurid blue background with sprinklings of silver.
On an old clock there would glow pea-green hands and numerals, mysterious.
If I should die before I wake / I pray the Lord my soul to take. . . .
They've cut that out now, they've quit all that, for safety's sake, the letters and numerals of faint fire.
Clear as a bell, the substantial summer night rings with many hymns.
Mindlessly, a million singing insects obey the dictates of instinct.
Nor cloud nor moon obstructs the space that supervenes between each singing thing and each circling star.
Swastika stars, Siberian stars, science-fiction stars. . . . I ought to be in bed asleep. I ought to be in bed.
3:30 a.m., 73┬░. Thanks, clock; thank you, motherly thermometer.
And thank you, insects. You must know a million things, and I may know a million million,
But what is that? What difference could that make
Compared to all of the infinitely subdivided infinities
Deep inside each spontaneous antique atom of your song, each significant air and articulated rhythm, each phrase, item?
A dog, near by, barks once.
A far dog barks in answer, or as though in answer.
(Geckoes' echoes, letter perfect.)
Now they fall silent. A set of insect strings or membranes assumes a new network of music, musics.
Something, truck-like, hums,
Hums lower, then shifts deeper and goes on in a heavy-duty register, far away.
Some mourning dove or owl donates notes to the orchestra's chord. In light pajamas, on our front porch, I wonder what in the world is going on
In the world.
Strolling-while-leaning, one of the cats draws by, putting a lot of confident self-indulgent pressure on the backs of my naked ankles, idly seeking company and pleasure.
Who knows? The sun may not come up at all this morning,
In which case, cat, the lilies of the field will turn out to have been right all along.
The truck's pedal point is heard no more. We were a passacaglia, cat. Retail merchandising made this country great. Light travels light.
I think I would be better off illiterate again.
Reading Freud for hours on end has reduced my dreams to such ridiculous rubble.
Imagine me — also the year 1899 incarnate — at an Austro-Hungarian costume ball sporting a bearded mask of pasteboard
With a bakelite caption, " 1900. " . . . Now that's really dumb.
Well, what an amiable beast of burden I must be, to sit here, an oh-so-sensitive being being oh-so-sensitive,
One petty officer in the ancient and more or less honorable company of the world's poets, composing,
While out there in the Christlike darkness there throbs a country of mortgages,
A vast magnificent civilization founded on retail merchandising,
Every man a middleman, every beast, even, a middlebeast.
I bark a bit myself, inside. The insects' number is beyond me.
Listen: there used to be a verse in the book of Ezekiel,
One of those wonderfully overstated mosaic rhapsodies of gorgeous mockery addressed to poor old ruined Tyre:
The suburbs shall shake at the sound of the cry of thy pilots.
Or words to that effect, something like that, prepositional triads wall-to-wall, hot-and-cold-running alliteration and internal rhymes, Dark Age verb forms.
The verse may be there yet, for all I know.
Even if I weren't scared to death to open that black Jacobean book, though, it would still be too dark to read.
Even so, if starlight, doglight, catlight, buglight, nightlight, whatever, were enough to see by, I would make it out there, in good order,
The twenty-seventh chapter and the twenty-eighth verse: suburbs , pilots , just like now.
And the language so grand that Kipling could speculate that Shakespeare had had a hand in it.
Pilots , not a mile from here at an airport named for a philosophy professor,
Or over yonder where the modern Lebanese are flattening their Tyre again.
But the wreckage and the prophet's mantic number remain beyond me.
Yawn.
They're burning the thermometer at both ends nowadays, and I certainly ought to be in bed asleep.
But something from the Golden Age lodges in my wake. Long ago, when I was a child, able to sleep all night every night,
They used to write scriptures out in sacred radium that glowed in the very dark,
Perfect letters on a lurid blue background with sprinklings of silver.
On an old clock there would glow pea-green hands and numerals, mysterious.
If I should die before I wake / I pray the Lord my soul to take. . . .
They've cut that out now, they've quit all that, for safety's sake, the letters and numerals of faint fire.
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