Judgment
The doctor arrives to inject the movie star against delirium tremens.
Hands that lie so often calm on the horse’s mane are shaking.
His hair hangs down like a skier’s hair after a fall.
From a whirlpool drops of black water fly up,
And thousands and thousands of years go by—
Like an infinite procession of walnut shells.

That hair that fell to the floor of the barbershop over thirty years
Lives on in some other place outlasting death.
And those shoelaces, shiny and twisted, that we tossed to the side,
Live on in their place, and the Hippopotamus horde arrives;
The newly dead kneel, and a tip of the lace sends them on into fire!

Affinity
I say the clumps of hair weep.
Because hair does not long for immense states.
Hair does not hate the poor.
Hair is merciful,
Like the arch of night under which the juvenile singer lolls back drunk.
Hair is excitable as a child of four or five;
It is a hammock on which the sleeper lies,
Dizzy with heat and the earth’s motion.

There are golden pins lying in bureau drawers,
Whose faces shine with power. They shine
Like the cheekbones of saints radiant in their beds,
Or their great toes that light up the whole room!

Judgment
Prince Philip becomes irritable, the royal sports car
Shoots down the narrow roads;
Judy Garland is led hysterical to the Melbourne plane.
The General joins the Jehovah’s Witnesses.

There are men who look, and cannot find the road,
And die coughing particles of black flesh onto neighboring roofs.

Nailheads that have been brooding on Burton’s Melancholy under
     Baltimore row houses
Roll out into the streets under tires,
And catch the Secretary of State
As he goes off to threaten the premiers of underdeveloped nations.

So many things are borne down by the world,
By bad luck, corpses pulled down by years of death,
Veins clogged with flakes of sludge,
Mouths from which bats escape at death,
Businessmen reborn as black whales sailing under the Arctic ice.

Affinity
I say it is all right. The earth has hair cathedrals.
The priest comes down the aisle wearing caterpillar fur.
In his sermons the toad defeats the knight.

The dying man waves his son away.
He wants his daughter-in-law to come near
So that her hair will fall over his face.

The Senator’s plane falls in an orchard in Massachusetts.
And there are bitter places, knots
That leave dark pits in the sawdust…
The nick on the hornblade through which the mammoth escapes.