Saraband

Saraband

Select your sorrows if you can,

Edit your ironies, even grieve with guile.

Adjust to a world divided

Which demands your candid senses stoop to labyrinthine wiles

What natural alchemy lends

To the scrubby grocery boy with dirty hair

The lustre of Apollo, or Golden Hyacinths fabled stare.

If you must cross the April park, be brisk:

Avoid the cadence of the evening, eyes from afar

Lest you be held as a security risk

Solicit only the evening star.

Your desperate nerves fuse laughter with disaster

And higgledy piggledy giggle once begun

Crown a host of unassorted sorrows

You never could manage one by one.

The world that jibes your tenderness

Jails your lust.

Bewildered by the paradox of all your musts

Turning from horizon to horizon, noonday to dusk

It may be only you can understand:

On a mild sea afternoon of blue and gold

When the sky is a mild blue of a Chinese bowl

The bones of Hart Crane, sailors and the drugstore man

Beat on the oceans floor the same saraband.