Translations from the Flesh

Coupling on the Edge of Entropy

54 Coupling on the edge of entropy And here I am again, carrying water for the damned, When I should be riding out to neon nightclubs In the back of a limousine, a car so big it flattens cats And takes tight corners like a problem in geometry, With a license plate that reads Free Verse or Die And ten speakers shaken by Big Mabel and the Ballbreakers. Hiding from heaven, where the dark haloes flash on Like crime lights when you step in the wrong direction, Where all the angels train with the IRS, I still believe In the mercy of earth, in pardons retroactive to the womb. Let bygones be herecomes, and the last supper served up As lazy plates of meatloaf and tall bottles of Bud. But even then, what utopia would not collapse Under its own happiness? Ah, my friend, wintering down there In Pinesap, Mississippi, like a rabbit in the sweet weeds, You’ve never been struck by lightning, but often by Hailstones thrown down as if God, after all, Did play at dice, and loaded them to make His number. I’ve seen those snake eyes, too, a glare in the dim garden, Like two figs at the bottom of the fig leaf. There may be nothing new under the sun, but something stirs Below the sick moon pale from pulling tides all night. I’ve heard the groan of continents that grind against each other For the last inch of lebensraum in the sucking dirt. Even if I could live like a prophet on grasshoppers and dew, Shouting out my bearded visions to the birds 55 Until the sky caved in, stars under my feet like spent gravel, What’s one man against the laws of a raucous universe? From that stammer and crack, that inbred wail, I’ll take The echo’s ring and marry my own shadow, my bitter half. ...