13

 
The jungle was a mutiny of limbs.
He couldn't tell his fingers from the worms.
Each hypertrope's unctuous display deformed
itself incorporating prey.  Screams

 
magnified muteness.  Death was comedy.
He vowed - distended in extremity -
if I return once more to the limpid city
of the living... he would renounce all vanity :

 
habits of monkeys, haughty beastliness,
stubborn querulous gaudy fraudulence,
the bent for quarreling, the indolence,
the time's idolatries... the tide's excess.

 
The jaguar (half animal, half jungle) (or
its spotted shadow) listened.  A chrysalis
hung from an almond tree : a pendulous
appendage (cicada, drowsy bugler).

 
Fevered, his father seemed oaken volume,
valid redeemer; his mother, the almond tree;
and a wind (where there was none) breezed
his crown with their features, like a pendulum

 
of heart-beats.  Bored, then, jaguar padded off.
The former president was bloated cask.
Ground smooth, grown fretted basilisk
of weedy breath.  The planet was enough,

 
he seemed to be chanting, over, over and over.
As if the jaguar and he had parceled out
the river in a double game of go - absolute
checkmate.  And he wore a crown of jungle clover.