Stand back the clinch-hearted cynic,

stand back the pimp with the nickel-bright pistol

hid in your deep-pocket fur, stand back the cleric

with your desert-fever book bitter as a scorpion,

stand back the jones men and the corrupters, stand back

the scornful and the sophisticate with your curling lips

 

Charged with young hope and lust and the damp sweet air

of the summer night,

a nimbus now builds up about the marble and chrome

of the candy-store counter, a gleam is thrown out

from the broad window upon the sidewalk, a glamour

runs like dark water down the tree-scented Brooklyn streets,

through the tossing leaf-shadow beneath the streetlamps

 

Stand back from these two

young and clumsy and obedient to heat and the moon

who now enfold the god and the goddess in their bodies,

awkwardly pressing close and dressed in their outlandish clothes

and singing to each other as they dance:

Oh baby we'll be happy

for a while

 

And the goddess is wearing her like a shawl,

like a mask, like a cloth doll, like a zombie, and the god

is moving in him like groundwater through a root,

and the wind leaps up like a salmon,

and the night is spinning like an air-riding seed,

and the tree-borne blossoms lean down toward the shadowed concrete

and their perfume pools in the black doorways 

 

Stand back the gray-jawed elders, your mouths full of salt and lemon;

stand back the uncles and aunts, your veins choked with grit;

stand back from these two:

their blood is thick and hot as melting beeswax,

their flesh burns with divinity

through the rags of the hour