Kinglsey Amis: "Something Was Moaning in the Corner"

O muskrat, ramble through the living grass
And coil the leaves on the abandoned bone;
Bring to the midden your eliding grease
And load the summer zephyrs with your bane.

O viper, mad with coiling on a pin,

Deadly Narcissus gazing on your scales,

Vomit your naked young sentenced to pain

And learn to love the bad sun where it scalds.

O spider, crawl into my tiny heart

And find your doom. The blood is vacant there.
With needle legs prick my dull skin apart
And build your web of sweet inhuman hair.

*

One of several experiential elements which have not yet been translated from physical libraries to e-reader storefronts and other digital spaces (I'm looking at you, Cushing Academy) is the likelihood of serendipitous discoveries brought about by catalog propinquity. Case in point: I was looking for a Kingsley Amis novel not too long ago, and happened to find on the library shelf in the same section, the thin volume which I have since discovered is relatively rare: Bright November, Amis' first collection, published by The Fortune Press in 1947, and from which the poem above is taken. A neat thing, -- imperfect to be sure, but full of Positions and Perspectives which would get a newly-minted MFA in trouble now-a-days is he or she tried to thicken a first manuscript with them.