The Lobster

Here at the Super Duper, in a glass tank

Supplied by a rill of cold fresh water

Running down a glass washboard at one end

And siphoned off at the other, and so

Perpetually renewed, a herd of lobster

Is made available to the customer

Who may choose whichever one he wants

To carry home and drop into boiling water

And serve with a sauce of melted butter.

Meanwhile, the beauty of strangeness marks

These creatures, who move (when they do)

With a slow, vague wavering of claws,

The somnambulist¹s effortless clambering

As he crawls over the shell of a dream

Resembling himself. Their velvet colors,

Mud red, bruise purple, cadaver green

Speckled with black, their camouflage at home,

Make them conspicuous here in the strong

Day-imitating light, the incommensurable

Philosophers and at the same time victims

Herded together in the marketplace, asleep

Except for certain tentative gestures

Of their antennae, or their imperial claws

Pegged shut with a whittled stick at the wrist.

We inlanders, buying our needful food,

Pause over these slow, gigantic spiders

That spin not. We pause and are bemused,

And sometimes it happens that a mind sinks down

To the blind abyss in a swirl of sand, goes cold

And archaic in a carapace of horn,

Thinking: There's something underneath the world.

The flame beneath the pot that boils the water.