Nineteen straight days of October rain
chasten our world, most peculiarly
our woods, to a hazy impression
along the parkside where you paint.
But what is this pulpy blue? The great,
the near-great, the pseudo-great,
of Delft, of Capri, or China,
Italy, Dresden, or Prussia,
Pompeii, Denmark, or Persia?
Something sad, deadly, obscene,
something, do not ask me what, call it
aquamarine, invades and stiffens.

 

A match-flare and a glamorous
puff-ball gutter on a darkened air.
Someone playful, exotic, filmic
exhaling a grey fume.
Leaving the deep-six graveyard at Hatteras,
spendthrift as spindrift,
I blew myself to winding cloth-bolts,
woodwork buoyant as Queequeg's.
I spreed all day
among spreadout Tar Heels,
footloose in Ivanhoe and Calypso,
Tomahawk, Eureka, Comfort,
Tarboro and Mount Olive,
fetching up in Pocahontas.
At an evening meal of smoked flesh,
I stuck fast and watched a little hour,

spying from a vine-lashed gazebo.
On the breathless night air
I witnessed flares and puff-balls,
I eavesdropped on rasps
when she would snuffle,
smirch and smut the air
with hacking, rattling, furtive
last-gasp coughs.