I, Maximus of Gloucester, to You

Off-shore, by islands hidden in the blood jewels & miracles, I, Maximus a metal hot from boiling water, tell you what is a lance, who obeys the figures of the present dance 1 the thing you’re after may lie around the bend of the nest (second, time slain, the bird! the bird! And there! (strong) thrust, the mast! flight (of the bird o kylix, o Antony of Padua sweep low, o bless the roofs, the old ones, the gentle steep ones on whose ridge-poles the gulls sit, from which they depart, And the flake-racks of my city! 2 love is form, and cannot be without important substance (the weight say, 58 carats each one of us, perforce our goldsmith’s scale feather to feather added (and what is mineral, what is curling hair, the string you carry in your nervous beak, these make bulk, these, in the end, are the sum (o my lady of good voyage in whose arm, whose left arm rests no boy but a carefully carved wood, a painted face, a schooner! a delicate mast, as bow-sprit for forwarding 3 the underpart is, though stemmed, uncertain is, as sex is, as moneys are, facts! facts, to be dealt with, as the sea is, the demand that they be played by, that they only can be, that they must be played by, said he, coldly, the ear! By ear, he sd. But that which matters, that which insists, that which will last, that! o my people, where shall you find it, how, where, where shall you listen when all is become billboards, when, all, even silence, is spray-gunned? when even our bird, my roofs, cannot be heard when even you, when sound itself is neoned in? when, on the hill, over the water where she who used to sing, when the water glowed, black, gold, the tide outward, at evening when bells came like boats over the oil-slicks, milkweed hulls And a man slumped, attentionless, against pink shingles o sea city) 4 one loves only form, and form only comes into existence when the thing is born born of yourself, born of hay and cotton struts, of street-pickings, wharves, weeds you carry in, my bird of a bone of a fish of a straw, or will of a color, of a bell of yourself, torn 5 love is not easy but how shall you know, New England, now that pejorocracy is here, how that street-cars, o Oregon, twitter in the afternoon offend a black-gold loin? how shall you strike, o swordsman, the blue-red black when, last night, your aim was mu-sick, mu-sick, mu-sick And not the cribbage game? (o Gloucester-man, weave your birds and fingers new, your roof-tops, clean shit upon racks sunned on American braid with others like you, such extricable surface as faun and oral, satyr lesbos vase o kill kill kill kill kill those who advertise you out) 6 in! in! the bow-sprit, bird, the beak in, the bend is, in, goes in, the form that which you make, what holds, which is the law of object, strut after strut, what you are, what you must be, what the force can throw up, can, right now hereinafter erect, the mast, the mast, the tender mast! The nest, I say, to you, I Maximus, say under the hand, as I see it, over the waters from this place where I am, where I hear, can still hear from where I carry you a feather as though, sharp, I picked up in the afternoon delivered you a jewel, it flashing more than a wing, than any old romantic thing, than memory, than place, than anything other than that which you carry than that which is, call it a nest, around the head of, call it the next second than that which you can do!