Chapter 5 Saraband

Select your sorrows if you can, Edit your ironies, even grieve with guile. Adjust to a world divided Which demands your candid senses stoop to labyrinthine wiles What natural alchemy lends To the scrubby grocery boy with dirty hair The luster of Apollo, or Golden Hyacinths fabled stare. If you must cross the April park, be brisk: Avoid the cadence of the evening, eyes from afar Lest you be held as a security risk Solicit only the evening star. Your desperate nerves fuse laughter with disaster And higgledy piggledy giggle once began Crown a host of unassorted sorrows

You never could manage one by one. The world that jibes your tenderness Jails your lust. Bewildered by the paradox of all your musts Turning from horizon to horizon, noonday to dusk It may be only you can understand: On a mild sea afternoon of blue and gold When the sky is a mild blue of a Chinese bowl The bones of Hart Crane, sailors and the drugstore man Beat on the oceans floor the same saraband.