The hart he’s on the hill.
The stout woodpigeon
Sobs her patient measure
From out a muffled shrub.
How neat her gilded eye
Too spare for garlanded
Ornament. Still to be
Marquetry, and to coo.
*
Past avenues of pines
I’ll journey to whiteness.
Small wife at the gate
Be mild as is your nature.
Over bristling plains
By six municipalities
Eagerly I’ll bounce
Into a thronged arcade,
Lanterns rosy at night
Looped from mossy tiles.
Rounded in lamplight
Thou, gleaming myriad.
*
Dogged brute paddles
To raise its decent Arf
Tail streams feathered
And muzzle jutted out.
Bright brown the water
And bright brown the fur
Near drowned the barking
Through coffee liqueur.
*
Glossed ilex, and the olive groves striped
By dry runnels. Resistible. Went wandering
Up and down & all throughout the town
Past its ‘spandrels representing the electric
Telegraph’. There may be a tale, though
A song precede it. That woodpigeon
Groans nicely to fan her leaves, yet not to
Keen, though interlaced with briars, though
We think as our lives have led us to think
Or on the whole; though the dusk settles in
Like . . . like a metaphor. Though though.