This Passing and Half-Conscious God

Close-pored flawless skin – body tight as some bright satin
bow – whose lightness preternaturally glows, bestows
its unconsidered loveliness as if it were the norm,

the simple grand condition of the Universe, a form so
utterly unquestioned and replete with its own sense
of its completeness that you’re left unutterably out.

Oh yes, there are these creatures who do not appear
to know how marvelously well they glide across
your hungry vision – hungry first for them, then

quickly after – second, third – for some graced godlike
sweet capacity to touch again at least a thread
of the diaphanous remembered hem of your own youth:

sadistic demonstration of the Keatsian equation: beauty,
truth, and truth and beauty tangled up: and wedded
to the duty, somehow, of this passing and half-conscious

god who makes you understand, by contrast, just how
muddily you plod. He speaks of other lovely ones,
with whom he can’t not feel that he competes: aha! –

he suffers from those vast comparative dark agonies,
it’s true; perhaps much worse (you dare to take some little
solace) than the ones that seize, through him, at you.




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