It was raining in the capital
And for many days and nights
The one they called the Aquarian
Had stayed alone with her delight.
What with the winter and its business
It had fallen to one side
And she had only recently picked it up
Where the other had died.
Between the pages of the newspaper
It smiled like a face.
Next to the drugstore on the corner
It looked to another place.
Or it would just hang around
Like sullen clouds over the sun.
But—this was the point—it was real
To her and to everyone.
For spring had entered the capital
Walking on gigantic feet.
The smell of witch hazel indoors
Changed to narcissus in the street.
She thought she had seen all this before:
Bundles of new, fresh flowers,
All changing, pressing upward
To the distant office towers.
Until now nothing had been easy,
Hemmed in by all that shit—
Horseshit, dogshit, birdshit, manshit—
Yes, she remembered having said it,
Having spoken in that way, thinking
There could be no road ahead,
Sobbing into the intractable presence of it
As one weeps alone in bed.
Its chamber was narrower than a seed
Yet when the doorbell rang
It reduced all that living to air
As “kyrie eleison” it sang.
Hearing that music he had once known
But now forgotten, the man,
The one who had waited casually in the dark
Turned to smile at the door’s span.
He smiled and shrugged—a lesson
In the newspaper no longer
But fed by the ink and paper
Into a sign of something stronger
Who reads the news and takes the bus
Going to work each day
But who was never born of woman
Nor formed of the earth’s clay.
Then what unholy bridegroom
Did the Aquarian foretell?
Or was such lively intelligence
Only the breath of hell?
It scarcely mattered at the moment
And it shall never matter at all
Since the moment will not be replaced
But stand, poised for its fall,
Forever. “This is what my learning
Teaches,” the Aquarian said,
“To absorb life through the pores
For the life around you is dead.”
The sun came out in the capital
Just before it set.
The lovely death’s head shone in the sky
As though these two had never met.