O dear sweet rosy
unattainable desire
… how sad, no way
to change the mad
cultivated asphodel, the
visible reality …and skin’s appalling
petals—how inspired
to be so lying in the living
room drunk naked
and dreaming, in the absence
of electricity …
over and over eating the low root
of the asphodel,
gray fate …rolling in generation
on the flowery couch
as on a bank in Arden—
my only rose tonite’s the treat
of my own nudity.
Fall, 1953