23.

If joy could screeve from lung and marrow

And love could exsect sorrow from the blood

I could watch the snow on the cardinal

As it was, not as a sign of something else.

Years indurate the mind, thoughts stone, the rain

Gall to our dance, when young, we would sing

Not golem then, and crooch by the shore

The fire the night missed with the moon.

There was something comic: she said they would

Bummel, less graceful than deer, ideas

Big-footed as clowns, the paronomasia

Of love poetry playing with sound.

I cut my knuckle on a thorn, not words,

And the rails were asymptotes of desire.