O dear sweet rosy

unattainable desire

...how sad, no way

to change the mad

cultivated asphodel, the

visible reality...

and skin's appalling

petals -how inspired

to be so lying in the living

room drunk naked

and dreaming, in the absence

of electricity...

over and over eating the low root

of the asphodel,

gray fate...

rolling in generation

on the flowery couch

as on a bank in Arden -

my only rose tonite's the treat

of my own nudity.

A.G.

Fall, 1953. Earlier Poems.