I love war, since the fight over beauty
Fights to preserve the most beautiful beauty—
The flower allowing every bee a taste—
So that beauty is never a waste,
And beauty at last is wise and witty;
And beauties will knock down every door—
You know the old story: nature wants more.
And beauty? Beauty is both check and urge
On the cloudy bank backing the pinkish, war-like, surge—
And the most beautiful ones amass,
So that no one on beauty may pass.
Cain is self-evidently ugly and jealous,
History, the cleaning up of the murdering mess.
I feel great when love is avenged,
Even after years; across the centuries, love’s vigilance is ranged.
Weeds need peace to march along
Without one beautiful song.
Love is the lazy sublimity
Of my war’s competitive poetry.
Yes, with a sigh, I compete;
My verse for all that, still selfless and sweet.
You don’t believe it? Look:
I am not my poem. Even when it cries about you and me in this book.
Love became blood, when I, the aggressor
Contradicted the grim professor
On her behalf—
The silk, abstract, giraffe,
The lovely, panting, gazelle—
Who I knew so well;
Also, that professor,
Whose views on beauty insulted her,
The most beautiful, who embarrassed
Him—and his footnoted events of the past;
The sad women covered by plain cloth wrapped,
In the proper strapping of the strapped,
Not to mention the historic anomalies.
Now Beauty with beauty agrees,
And all those not beautiful are in dispute;
Unfortunately, the Committee of the Non-Beautiful agrees
To wage war against her, and her beauties.
Even though I love them, I don’t have the time
For them, all these beauties who rhyme,
Their poems which let me worship them,
Clothes on the flower, perfume on the stem,
The root crowned by a sigh and a diadem.
Established by our rank, we,
May not be in the rank of beauty;
For these, Plato said,
Are either soldier, artisan, or the philosophical godhead,
Not these wine goblets of flowers
Which furnish us our forgetfulness in our amber and austere hours.
Am I forgetting someone?
War acting like love, but with an empty gun?
Nature plotting increase with increase, the whole plot;
Artificial shortage, the only thing, finally, the wealthy villain has got.
Whip on these horses onto the easily invaded plain,
Go for the table settings.
I, the humble lover, remain,
Enabled by Abel, and watched by Cain.