Juvenilia The lion and the tigers turn to clay And Jumbo sadly trumpets into stone; The telegram says you have gone away. The morbid cobra's wits have run astray; He rents his poisons out by telephone; There is nothing more for me to say. The colored tents all topple in the bay; The magic sawdust writes: address unknown. The telegram says you have gone away; There is nothing more for me to say.
Two Lovers and a Beachcomber by the Real Sea Cold and final, the imagination Shuts down its fabled summer house; Blue views are boarded up; our sweet vacation Dwindles in the hour-glass. Thoughts that found a maze of mermaid hair Tangling in the tide's green fall Now fold their wings like bats and disappear Into the attic of the skull. We are not what we might be; what we are Outlaws all extrapolation Beyond the interval of now and here: White whales are gone with the white ocean. A lone beachcomber squats among the wrack Of kaleidoscopic shells Probing fractured Venus with a stick Under a tent of taunting gulls. No sea-change decks the sunken shank of bone That chuckles in backtrack of the wave; Though the mind like an oyster labors on and on, A grain of sand is all we have. Water will run by rule; the actual sun Will scrupulously rise and set; No little man lives in the exacting moon And that is that, is that, is that. 327