Angel! O, gather it, pluck it, that small-flowered healing herb.

Make a vase, keep it safe! Place it among those joys not yet

open to us: on a lovely urn,

praise it, with flowery, swirling, inscription:

                                  ‘Subrisio Saltat: the Saltimbanque’s smile’

You, then, beloved,

you, that the loveliest delights

silently over-leapt. Perhaps

your frills are happy for you –

or the green metallic silk,

over your firm young breasts,

feels itself endlessly pampered, and needing nothing.

You, market fruit of serenity

laid out, endlessly, on all the quivering balance scales,

publicly, beneath the shoulders.

Where, oh where is the place – I carry it in my heart –

where they were still far from capable, still fell away

from each other, like coupling animals, not yet

ready for pairing: -

where the weights are still heavy:

where the plates still topple

from their vainly twirling

sticks.......

And, suddenly, in this troublesome nowhere, suddenly,

the unsayable point where the pure too-little

is changed incomprehensibly -, altered

into that empty too-much.

Where the many-placed calculation

is exactly resolved.

 Squares: O square in Paris, endless show-place,

where the milliner, Madame Lamort,

winds and twists the restless trails of the earth,

endless ribbons, into new

bows, frills, flowers, rosettes, artificial fruits – all

falsely coloured, - for winter’s

cheap hats of destiny.

Angel: if there were a place we know nothing of, and there,

on some unsayable carpet, lovers revealed

what here they could never master, their high daring

figures of heart’s flight,

their towers of desire, their ladders,

long since standing where there was no ground, leaning,

trembling, on each other – and mastered them,

in front of the circle of watchers, the countless, soundless dead:

Would these not fling their last, ever-saved,

ever-hidden, unknown to us, eternally

valid coins of happiness in front of the finally

truly smiling pair on the silent

carpet?

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this poem provided courtesy of Mercy @:  http://goldeneyedgoddess.spaces.live.com/

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some music: John Lennon

                  Rolling Stones