Sonnet: To Eva

All right, let's say you could take a skull and break it

The way you'd crack a clock; you'd crush the bone

Between steel palms of inclination, take it,

Observing the wreck of metal and rare stone.

This was a woman : her loves and stratagems

Betrayed in mute geometry of broken

Cogs and disks, inane mechanic whims,

And idle coils of jargon yet unspoken.

Not man nor demigod could put together

The scraps of rusted reverie, the wheels

Of notched tin platitudes concerning weather,

Perfume, politics, and fixed ideals.

The idiot bird leaps up and drunken leans

To chirp the hour in lunatic thirteens.