DEPTHS

Textures? Why always textures?
The fuss. It is enough
You take and hold the thing:
That being warm, it gives you
A special sense of permanence.
Since but for the whole shape
There would be no texture.
Despair
Has texture. It is constructed
From a total helplessness.
Despair is texture; without it
We should not know how to face
The thing with such certainty
Of loss. But touching this,
We very gently feel
The whole paralysis
Of agony give way
Into the steadfastnesses
Of reality,
The differing planes of surface
We cannot avoid contact with
Which employ the sunk depths.

THE BOOK-PURCHASERS

Subjected to various
Pressures, in particular
The barren potencies
Of his society,
He bought, and kept,
A book of girls photography
Gives parts to, but not textures,
With breasts as big as Balzac’s
Computations of interest
And went to bed with each,
Finally, with five at once
Interchanging the parts of each girl;
An arm, buttocks, the smile
Re-pieced together as he would
But not yet as he had:
And this crowned
A mind as lustred as those
In the poor south.
And it was worth it since
For two-and-six he got
Purchases in lust
On several hundred nights.
Only the dissolvent of sex
Furthered his disintegration.
He found no position save in
The copiously inflamed
Multiplications of lust
Which overcame him. What
follows?
This follows: pain
Of barren sexuality
Suffused his soul.
The days sealed tighter
Like graves, his hot lives,
Kisses inside the earth
Which gradually suffocated him
In their profusion.
And then, the many men
Variously like him,
he offered the purchase of loose sands
Deleting from sex entirely
Love, that those following
Fell on the clambering grains and gave
To a dry planet drier lives
Eviscerated of the desire
To create anything
But the compositions of death.
This final perishing
Is the intermingling of man.
Weep for man, who can die.

THREE CRITICS

I speak of three critics.
The first is the most consideable
Yet for some time has been pre-occupied
With lineal purity,
Just as if syntax, that
Interlockage of human action,
Moved on the surface, merely,
Despite the medium.
His own verse is clenched
In morality, and cold
In the triumph of a voice
Supposedly neutral,
The second is one
Who asserts a belief
In the impersonal
In poetry, great poetry,
Suggesting the moral glimpse
Is suffused and obscured
By the insertion of
The ‘I’ in the text.
This can be so. He also
Wrote some verse.
The third still writes some.
He is like a ball
That lightly swerves, or even
In a high wind, is turned
In whoever blows, in contraries
Balancing all with civil
Hand. He has returned
Where he never came from.
This last, in some ways,
Is emblem of the first two,
Their stance cautioned
In the transparencies of intellect
Rather than intellect
Coupled to the embraces,
The convictions, of feeling.
And these three together
Composed in cold entablature
Reflect society, which
Has little warmth, much arrogance,
And little firmness.