Where Robot Mice And Robot Men Run Round In Robot Towns

The snow fell down and down with no lantern nor spark

Nor star nor moon to show its fracture and fall

Appalling in all its shivering shaken chill dusts

In soft clamors and tremors of panic it touched my sill

Like an old woman begging the storm to keep warm with mere crusts

And make do on my cat-couching hearth

Where a teakettle cinnamon puss kneels and folds

And beholds a soft inner contentment, a bumblebee simmer kept there

Like a hive on the hearth in a honeycomb color of cat

While nibbling the windows and gnawing raw rainspout toes

And flaking the rainbarrel frost there the smothering goes;

A funeral quell passes by in a pageant of lost

And cataracts windowpane eyes with a filming of frost

And sugars the dogs as they yellow-write sums in the snow—

Strange Orient alphabets sprinkled where smiling dogs go.

And the winter’s old bones fall apart in a shatter of white

And I bed with my bumblebee honeycomb cat for the night

And the sound of the snow grows in heart-murmur patterns yet dimmer

And the one thing I hear in deep sleep is the motor of cat:

What sound’s that?

Long-lost summer.

Boy Pope Behold! Dog Bishop See! (#ulink_950b0dda-ff2c-5065-bd46-1e9e970d9522)

Oh, pantry Deeps’ miscellany

Bestirs boy’s victual villainy,

Unwaters mouth of innocence,

Unshucks the soul of reticence;

For in the deeps of snowbin sweets

And hung-banana jungle treats

We wandered as a jump-squirrel boy

To amble, maunder, ponder, toy

With jellies, jams and other pelf

From apple-cherry-berry shelf,

And read the names and wondered how

Clown doughnuts lay in such deep snow;

And took cosmetic chocolate-chips

To draw moustache on virgin lips.

And full of candied avarice

Blacked-out our teeth with licorice,

And grinned like devilled ham at self

Preserved in mirror-jars on shelf

And saw our eyes gone berry-blue

As all the jams this summer grew,

And bright our lips as cherry sins

And ripe our smile as pumpkin grins;

And full our mind of murder/slaughter

But clean our breath as menthol water

That in the dripped night, dark and still

The old dog laps from icebox sill.

Boy Pope behold! Dog Bishop see!

Twin celebrants in dark pantry