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CDXVII

SHIFTY LEA
Jongkind's Church of Overschie
After the Crinkling Tide 211
has All hidden
under the parables
of poets like me, under

parched Sinces' gestures
or the Spring's mercy sans bounds

or memoryless Time

or Th'Grave's psalms/musics snivelling
of Monumental Nothingness
flooding ALL emptiness
with the dingles of its Chants

& waves of rigid desolations
wound round the numberless ghosts-
candles of Winter's wry Winds
multiplying themselves to thousands

& all the other Zero-Splendors

grant us our rusting
under words like The Dust
then--Tenderness!

after The Tides
after All Tides

after The Crinkling (tide)
even of all our mercies
Madness & Wisdoms
Man holds suspended above Mind

& their stunningly light
great weightlessness
makes Truth of our Going Away

Up towards the raining clouds

after The Tides
after ALL TIDES
after The Crinkling (tide)
then--Beauty!
a Rainbow
O our frowning downward lives-like-lies
Upwards! our drowning smiles-like-eyes

^{211} The Crinkling Tide is that one which smooths as it smothers (the most beautiful music of all). Not a sweet death, by the way, but a putting away (out) of Death. In the limited space of existence the body of Being moves not from one place to another place to the next (all being the same) but crinkled against itself in imperceptible metamorphosis (like the newly-fertilized ovum).@

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