1

No wonder, shaggy saint, breast-deep in Jordan’s
         Reflected gliding gardens
That you assumed their swift compulsion sacred;
Nor that, dreaming you drank, so cool the water,
Regeneration, of which the first taste maddens,
         You let spill on the naked
      Stranger a pure and tripled mitre;

Nor that later, brooding on the sacrament
         Of flowing streams, you went
Back where none flow, and went in a new dread
Of water’s claspings, whose rapt robe, whose crown
Make beggar and prince alike magnificent.
         A dry voice inside said,
      “Life is a pool in which we drown.”

Finally then, small wonder the small king,
         Your captor, slavering
In a gold litter, bitten to the bone
By what shall be, pretended not to hear
His veiled wild daughter sinuous on a string
         Of motives all her own
      Summon the executioner. 

2

Our neighbors’ little boy ran out to greet
         The chow, his runaway pet,
And was fearfully mauled. Breaking its mouth on fences
Down the struck street the orange mad dog tore
Until my father’s pistol made of it
         Pinks, reds, a thrash of senses
      Outside the stationery store.

I was crying, but stayed on to watch. I saw
         The swelled tongue, the black maw,
And had seen earlier this meek dog trot off
Into the brambles of a vacant lot,
Suspecting then what I now know as law:
         That you can have enough
      Of human love. The chow forgot

The dim back porch, whistle and water-bowl;
         Confessing with a growl
How sweetly they subdued, forgot caresses;
Began to suffer the exactitude
Of its first nature, which was animal.
         Back in the child’s oasis
      It told what it had understood.   
  
3

The camel’s vast thirst is the needle’s eye.
         Whosoever faithfully
Desires desire more than its object shall
Find his right heaven, be he saint or brute.
But in a child’s delirium never he
         Who next appears, the hale
      Young doctor from the Institute,

Atwirl like any exalted princess, or
         The ego of Pasteur,
Imperious for prophetic heads to probe
Upon a platter. “Ha!’ cries he, “this brow
Swaddles a tangleworld I must explore!
         Stout vein and swaying lobe
      Redden beneath my knives. And now

“Let chattering apes, let the last proud birds screech
         Abuse, well out of reach—”
Or later, quiet, drinks in the hiss and hurl
Of burning issues down to a pronged pool
Soon parched, mere clay, whose littlest crown ableach
         Suns lighten and winds whirl
      Back into earth, the easier school.