On what system is this dam’ dynamo of our universe wound?
On what he called ‘muckings’ (like a walrus affronted)?
That’s eye-strain! The big voice quavered:
‘I’ve been trying to disentangle the minor interferences
by returning once more to the legitimate drama of cultures.’
‘Midnight? Oh, certainly, but I’ll have to warn my anaesthetist
and reverently return some lenses to their velvet shrines.’
A doe with a plum-coloured saddle is squeaking.
She strives desperately to work through the wires
with semitransparent hand-like forefeet.
‘In convulsion?’
‘She’s not! She’s all astray,
external to this swab of culture which we call our world.
We’re in for a wildish time. She’s a woman—not a white mouse!’
Still, he jerked it up, his palm beneath her chin – with male horror.
Then came the explosion of natural human wrath, and
now she goes about like a smiling sheep.
‘It wasn’t worth it,’ was the light answer. ‘Just hysteria’…
when like a string she relaxed:
the vacuoles—the empty centres—do not take stain,
the vasts of the Ultimate Heavens
fizzing in spirals
singing, “Time Sucks, but Space is Okay.”
