26 - fever‑garden

FEVER‑GARDEN

I

Red living flakes of demon snow
        Poison‑relate the sinning air
To atom‑clear red sick flowers who
        Rootless jut out of Night and There

Relation being itself a clutch
        Upon the throbbing veins in seeing
So the surviving over‑much
        Is not contiguous to being

Yet philter‑aureole or lay
        Sung round the rites of altared vice
The poppies of o'er‑memory may
        Spin cobweb‑circles lusting thrice

Around the phallic selfness stood
        Midway from intellect to sense
Round whose void a tongued mist thrust‑dense
        To the cut lips gives conscious blood

II

She the despised communion owes
        To vice of tainting holy things
And making eucharists of throes
        When lust thickens with pin‑soft wings

For her mouth red till purple is black
        Supplies a space in the lost rites
And intermits our heart‑beats' track
        Senseward to demon infinites

Till on the point of the spasm cast
        Like a mantle on consciousness
The veil is rent in temple waste
        And the tongue‑flowers remouth from Space


5-5-1917