Thou still unravish’d bride of quietness…
Let us not probe this virgin nymph;
let us rejoice in the happy pieties
of the happy scene, the lovers
in their stony font, the brazen
construct of a silent wheel, its
hapless cry of certainty whose
story roils in a nameless potter’s
mix down to the cornered detail
with its damned and casual aplomb,
a sensual facet of a sunny day,
the heifer about to have its wind-
pipe slit, piping its bloody retch
into the shepherd wild, topped
with spiritual quatsch arising
amid jets of blood that steam
the thirsty earth to sate a passion
for artistic permanence. O happy
they! O ripened immanence!
The victim trembles to infinity,
anticipating the blade’s quick
swish across its neck—I’m going …
You come too—sweet sacrificial
carrion, your bovine flesh already
ravished by a mummer-godling
and his thrall machinery, dragged
to extinction into beauty’s stall.
What chance have you against
Eternity? No teasing out of thought
for you into compassion’s tear,
forgotten among the wildering effects
of elevated words, the exhalations
of unbloodied pensiveness,
a bloody ritual on a poor animal,
shored up by an old pot’s pseudo-
padded eidolon. The heifer goes to
her unenigmatic end, not worth
a single bossy’s mortal rattling
breath for this frosty pastoral-
parable, its bitter lozenge bitten
to stanch death, then rounded by
a spectrally didactical banality.
There’s no escaping this idyllic
woe, in word or stone—
begooned, begauded, and be gone!