These last few notes to you have been a bit somber like biographies of artists written by joyless people so that the whole book is a record of agony at thirty rather than thirty-three and a third. You know the sound - Keeeaaattts wuzzz verrry unhappppppy abouttt dyinnnng. So here are some of those off-the-wall extravagancies. Dawn in Ecuador with mariachi music, dawn at Ngorongoro with elephant far below in the crater swaggering through the marsh grass, dawn in Moscow and snowing with gold minarets shouting that you have at last reached Asia, dawn in Addis Ababa with a Muslim waver in the cool air smelling of ginger and a lion roaring on the lawn, dawn in bleary Paris with a roll tasting like zinc and a girl in a cellophane blouse staring at you with four miraculous eyes, dawn in Normandy with a conceivable princess breathing in the next room and horses wandering across the moat beneath my window, dawn in Montana with herons calling from the swamp, dawn in Key West wondering if it was a woman or tarpon that left your bed before cockcrow, dawn at home when your eyes are molten and the ghost of your dog chases the fox across the pasture, dawn on the Escanaba with trout dimpling the mist and the water with a dulcet roar, dawn in London when the party-girl leaves your taxi to go home to Shakespeare, dawn in Leningrad with the last linden leaves falling and you knocking at the door for a drunken talk but I am asleep. Not to speak of the endless and nearly unconscious water walks after midnight when even the stars might descend another foot to get closer to earth. Heat. The wetness of air. Couplings. Even the mosquitoes are lovely and seem to imitate miniature birds. And a lion's cough is followed rhythmically by a hyena's laugh to prove that nature loves symmetry. The black girl leaves the grand hotel for her implausibly shabby home. The poet had dropped five sorts of drugs in his belly swill of alcohol and has imagined his deathless lines commemorating your last Leningrad night. | Discover our Poem Explanations and Poet Analyses!Other Poems of Interest...THE HERETIC: 3. MOCKERY by LOUIS UNTERMEYER DON JUAN IN HELL by CHARLES BAUDELAIRE ODE INSCRIBED TO W.H. CHANNING by RALPH WALDO EMERSON THE ANGEL'S WHISPER by SAMUEL LOVER THE WANING MOON by PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY |