Classic Poem

From Porphyrio the Mad Prince to the Princesse Lointaine

I

Your hair is rufulous as the puffed rust
Blebbing a musket stock, vermicular
As the crimped locks stringing from the coif are
In Niccolo Fiorentino's bust
Of D'Este. Your odor carries no disgust
So long as rose-verbena haunts your silk cymar
And glaives of heat are not allowed to scar
Your skin that's thin as fish-scales. Yet unbussed
Your mouth pouts like a lethal red mushroom
Blistering spongy tree trunks in a wood
Anfractuous with boles and stumps. Assume
I am a wooden horse hauled or stood
To please some small Ulysses in the blood,
Is it not clever, this, your toppling doom?

II

O dearest planet, suffer an eclipse
Of silence! Much too long your speech has shone!
Your body is a fountain of white stone
Green blistered by the trickling mouth which drips
A viridescent glaze over the hips'
Rondure and down to the knees. A knuckle bone
Drubbed on a drunken table has a tone
Less cacotechnical than your two lips.
Regarding you acutely one divines
God's fatal penchant for the incomplete;
Yet I suppose not to uphold your hair
Against my brains were an adventure meet
Only for lank ephebes and androgynes —
But here I spunge a thought from Baudelaire.