The spider crab
is a conjunction of grandmother's
old darning-needles
claque-claquetting through the seaweed wool of the sea;
and here -
in our state-of-the-art exotic restaurant,
a congregation of sad crustaceans criss-
crosses one another in the pink fish-tank;
the ostrich, too, the leach, the maggot, lug-worm, squid
bespeak the strange abandonment
of the gravity of God, these signatures
of right reason's abdication;
and what of us? who articulate our lewd responses
as if we count for something, as if we matter:
man the destroyer, his ego-carapace,
the long reaching pincers of the self;
who must become, in his sad congregations,
transparent as a green fresh-water shrimp
till you can see right through him
into the embarrassed eyes of God;
like Jerome
staring into the skulls's clean sockets
of Anthony in the desert,
a conjunction of bones on the sea of sand.