Karl Shapiro

As a sloop with a sweep of immaculate wing on her delicate spine And a keel as steel as a root that holds in the sea as she leans, Leaning and laughing, my warm-hearted beauty, you ride, you ride, You tack on the curves with parabola speed and a kiss of goodbye, Like a thoroughbred sloop, my new high-spirited spirit, my kiss. As my foot suggests that you leap in the air with your hips of a girl, My finger that praises your wheel and announces your voices of song, Flouncing your skirts, you blueness of joy, you flirt of politeness, You leap, you intelligence, essence of wheelness with silvery nose, And your platinum clocks of excitement stir like the hairs of a fern. But how alien you are from the booming belts of your birth and the smoke Where you turned on the stinging lathes of Detroit and Lansing at night And shrieked at the torch in your secret parts and the amorous tests, But now with your eyes that enter the future of roads you forget; You are all instinct with your phosphorous glow and your streaking hair. And now when we stop it is not as the bird from the shell that I leave Or the leathery pilot who steps from his bird with a sneer of delight, And not as the ignorant beast do you squat and watch me depart, But with exquisite breathing you smile, with satisfaction of love, And I touch you again as you tick in the silence and settle in sleep.

Mail-day, and over the world in a thousand drag-nets The bundles of letters are dumped on the docks and beaches, And all that is dear to the personal conscious reaches Around us again like filings around iron magnets, And war stands aside for an hour and looks at our faces Of total absorption that seem to have lost their places. O demobilized for a moment, a world is made human, Returns to a time that is neither the present or then, But a garland of clippings and wishes of who-knows-when, A time of its own creation, a thing of acumen That keeps us, like movies, alive with a purpose, aside From the play-acting truth of the newsreel in which we have died. And aside from the candy and pictures and books we receive, As if we were patients whose speedy recovery were certain, There is proof of the End and the lights and the bow at the curtain, After which we shall smile at each other and get up to leave. Aside from the play in the play there is all that is fact, These letters, the battle in progress, the place of the act. And the optimal joy of the conflict, the tears of the ads May move us or not, and the movies at night in the palms May recall us or not to the kiss, and on Sunday the psalms May remind us of Sunday or not, but aside from the lads Who arrive like our letters still fresh from the kiss and the tear, There are mouths that are dusty and eyes that are wider than fear. Say no more of the dead than a prayer, say no more of the land Where the body is laid in the coral than that it is far; Take your finger away from the map of wherever-we-are, For we lie in the map of the chart of your elderly hand; Do not hasten the future; in agony too there is time For the growth of the rose of the spirit astir in the slime. For aside from ourselves as we are there is nothing alive Except as it keeps us alive, not tomorrow but now, Our mail-day, today of the blood of the sweat of our brow, The year of our war to the end. When and where we arrive Is no matter, but how is the question we urgently need, How to love and to hate, how to die, how to write and to read.