Buffalo

    April dusk
    It is tragic to be a poet now
    And not a lover
    Paradised under the mutest bough.

The high-falluting spin
The dance - 
I am partnered by spirit
Chaste as fire
And flash my own dream-impotence
Like an unearthed electric wire

Once there was rich
Reality of pain
Saying each morning at my bedroom do[or]
The sun is risen again.

If she should come to me again I'd be
wise to the veiléd vanities of woman,
I'd listen with my eyes to symphony
sculptured purely from affliction human,
I'd stand without the gates of pity-pain
on greenless earth, without curse or care
or prayer, if she should rapture me again
The might of mind would flood the wind of her.

From a handful of dead thoughts, from the chaos of yesterday
I have made a new world
Light and Darkness I have split - 
The old riddle with a new answer to it
My children run terrified
From the tree of Knowledge
Timid as a first instinct
Or a first lover.

Ah when will they come again,
Their arms stretched out before them like soft, rather hypocrite men
Coaxing the neighbours creeping babe to chance
The little legs?

I said I'd break out
And leave the rut
To the lout
And the slut
And the no-good doers.

Today I sat on a withered green seat
Somewhere in the Park
Where the foliage of the trees was most pronounced, so the heat
Of June's sun was no more than a spark
Mirrored in a pool of old glass.

A little place
Though in a dated fashion,
A spirit-cell
Secure from rowdy passion,
Or when thought-winds blow stormy
A convent for me.

If she should come to me again I'd be
wise to the veiléd vanities of woman,
I'd listen with my eyes to symphony
sculptured purely from affliction human,
I'd stand without the gates of pity-pain
on greenless earth, without curse or care
or prayer, if she should rapture me again
The might of mind would flood the wind of her.

Winter encloses me,
I am fenced
The light the laugh the dance
Against.

I am like a monk
In a grey cell
Copying out my soul's
Queer miracle

What goes on out there
In the light
Is less than [] blue-bottle's flirtation
Yet, spite
I would be a blue-bottle
Or a house-fly
And let the monk the []
In cobwebs lie.