Portraits VI

Cleopatra built
like a smooth arrow or
a fleet pillar is eaten
by yesterday

she was a silver tube of wise
lust whose arms and legs
like white squirming pipes
wiggle upon the perfumed roman

strength who how
furiously plays the hot
sweet horrible stops of
her

body
Cleopatra had a
body
it was

thick slim warm moist
built like an organ
and it
loved

he
was a roman    theirs was a
music sinuous globular
slippery intense witty huge

and its chords
brittle eager eternal luminous
firmly diminishing have swoopingly
fallen svelte sagging gone into the soaring silence

(put
your smallest
ear against yester-
day My Lady    hear

the purple trumpets
blow    horses of gold
delicately crouching beneath silver
youths    the leaneyed

Caesars borne neatly through enormous
twilight surrounded by their triumphs
and
    listen well

how the dainty destroyed
hero clamps the hearty sharp
column
of Egypt

        ,build like a fleet
pillar or a smooth
arrow
Cleopatra is eaten by

yester-
day)
        O i tell you out of
the minute incessant Was irrevocably

emanates a dignity of papyruscoloured
faces    superbly limp
the ostensible centuries
therefore let us be

a little uncouth and amorous in
memory of Cleopatra and of
Antony
and we will

confuse hotly our moreover irrevocable
bodies while the infinite processions
move like moths and like boys and
like incense and like sunlight

and like ships and like young girls and like
butterflies and like money
and like laughter
and like elephants

through our
single
brain    in memory of Cleopatra    while
easily

tremendously
floats
in the bright shouting street of time
her nakedness with its blue hair

(all is eaten by yester-
day
between the nibbling timid teethful hours
wilts the stern texture of Now

the arrow and the
pillar pursue curiously
a crumbling flight into the absolute stars
the gods are swallowed

even
Nile
the
kind black great god)

Cleopatra you
are eaten
by yester-
day

(and O My Lady Lady Of
Ladies you
who move beautifully in the winds
of my lust like a high troubling

ship upon the fragrant
unspeaking ignorant darkness of New
Lady whose kiss is
a procession of deep beasts

coming with keen ridiculous
silks coming with sharp languid perfumes
coming with the little profound gems and
the large laughing stones

a sinuous problem of colour
floating against
the clever deadly
heaven    i salute

you
whose body is
Egypt
whose hair is Nile)

put your ear
to the ground
there is a music
Lady

          the noiseless truth of swirling
worms
is
tomorrow