There is a city whose fair houses wizen
In a strict web of streets, of waterways
In which the clock tower gurgles and sways,
And there desire is freed from the body's prison.

Into a black impasse deep in the maze
A mirror thrusts her brilliant severed head,
Mouth red and moist, and pale curls diamonded.
A youth advances towards the wraith, delays,

Squints through the window at a rumpled bed,
Cat, the familiar, lolling on batik,
The leman's person now no more unique
Than any hovel uninhabited,

Then turns, leaving her wrappered in a reek
Of realism, back the way he came.
Her jewels rekindle in their sooty frame
Lights for a future sleuth of the oblique.

(Once, once only to have laid absolute claim
Upon that love long held in readiness,
Not by the flesh in any stale undress,
Nor by the faithful ghost whose lips inflame

Lips curling dry, licked once to evanesce;
One night one autumn, so to have taken hold
Of certain volumes violent yet controlled
As to leave nothing for regret, unless

A strand of hair, pale auburn not quite gold
On the creased cushion, being what you must bear,
Guided the passion to its hush, like prayer,
And paler, cooler, tapered, as foretold,

Into the sheer gold of nobody's hair,
The fragrance of whatever we suppose
Wafted, as music over what flows
Into the darkened sleeper, now elsewhere...)

Next day, it is myself whose image those
Stunning their own on the canal's far side
Are smiling to see reel at the downglide
Of one leaf, wallow, painfully recompose?

My head has fallen forward open-eyed.
Word of somebody's Schumann - 'like a swan
That breasts a torrent of obsidian' -
Idles below me in formaldehyde.