Flowers cut will sing their clime
in someone else’s house
and rudiments
keep time that keeps
its freshness dead in things—
and justice
justices, and means mean and satisfy
the offshore world,
the painted gull who wheels and cries
I am what hurts me—
Against which lyric’s revenge is what,
the tact to fence a patch
of air and stand inside
like a unicorn in its little plywood pen?
Or the skill it puts on meanly
with its error,
to claim what things are like
not what they are. The moon
goes up and down the moon
consensual
Like a man. Let the deathless flowers bloom.