Iced over soon; it’s nothing; we’re used to sickness;
too little perspiration in the bucket—
in the beginning, polio once a summer. Not now;
each day the cork more sweetly leaves the bottle,
except a sudden falseness in the breath . . . .
Sooner or later the chalk wears out the smile,
and angrily we skate on blacker ice,
playthings of the current and cold fish—
the naught is no longer asset or disadvantage,
our life too long for comfort and too brief
for perfection—Cro-Magnon, dinosaur . . .
the neverness of meeting nightly like surgeons’
apprentices studying their own skeletons,
old friends and mammoth flesh preserved in ice.