Summer's sleeveless blues
and nude degrees earned—
how do they grow such vine
from sun and earth,
so eager to be pressed,
even though one cannot be
sufficiently prinked with shade
or stay enough overdressed
in beads of pearling sweat
and their unctuous sheen?
And still, on the winding way
of such a drink and taste,
vine boughs grow all gnarled,
not unlike the gargoyles
by those exalted tiles and eaves,
with their tips and heels
well tied to blood and flesh
to be offered to a pious mouth
from within the covers
of a book and holy Mass,
where the church holds
its perfumed navel as a cup,
and those devils on the outside
surely pour in—like the builders
whom Solomon himself,
with the harem and the Queen
of Sheba, invited and let in
on the secret over which
wing-clad dames kneel,
thus offering a bath,
or even a whole temple—
beth, lineage and house—
with pillars reaching
for the sky, like bread
pushed down into wine.
O, didn't Plutarch already
tell us that Osiris and Bacchus
were rather the same and one,
and so were Dionysus,
the cheery one, and grim Hades,
in that one little verse
from weeping Heraclitus
that reads like a footnote
when a scholar needs to hide,
saving the rest of his book
for less diligent eyes
to see by passing by?
But what else could
that God of Death
wish for—or ever need?
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