1.
O tiger listing in the marsh
without the symmetry of stone,
its tapered temporality:
for your ruin instead
the hard attack of plastics.
O fierce unlife! Yellow heat
will break your orange
but never the grudge of disposal,
though industrial wastes around
become plants and join
this cycle called
renewal and blight,
flipping our land
for how much longer;
2.
O marble lion waking still
as your partner sleeps in:
it is early, when the smell
of possibility is strongest,
and in the wisdom of your daze
you have not felt the petals
fallen pink as your hat
or have rested them
on the stripes of the order
of your settling, how you
lay long before lying here.
Hurrah for history!
though I but enter by it
to an area of my dwelling.
after Blake and Whitman