Song
W. D. Snodgrass

Sweet beast, I have gone prowling,
a proud rejected man
who lived along the edges
catch as catch can;
in darkness and in hedges
I sang my sour tone
and all my love was howling
conspicuously alone.

I curled and slept all day
or nursed my bloodless wounds
until the squares were silent
where I could make my tunes
singular and violent.
Then, sure as hearers came
I crept and flinched away.
And, girl, you’ve done the same.

A stray from my own type,
led along by blindness,
my love was near to spoiled
and curdled all my kindness.
I find no kin, no child;
only the weasel’s ilk.
Sweet beast, cat of my own stripe,
come and take my milk.

*

The Men’s Room in the College Chapel
W. D. Snodgrass

Here, in the most Unchristian basement
of this “fortress for the Christian mind,”
they close these four gray walls, shut out shame,
and scribble of sex and excrement,
draw bestial pictures and sign their names—
the old, lewd defiance of mankind.

The subversive human in his cell—
burn his vile books, stamp out his credo,
lock him away where no light falls,
and no live word can go back to tell
where he’s entombed like Monte Cristo—
yet, he’ll carve his platform in the walls.

In need, men have painted the deep caves
to summon their animal, dark gods:
even the reviled, early Christians
prayed in catacombs to outlawed Good,
laid their honored dead and carved out graves
with pious mottos of resistance.

This is the last cave, where the soul
turns in its corner like a beast
nursing its wounds, where it contemplates
vengeance, how it shall gather to full
strength, what lost cause shall it vindicate,
returning, masterless and twisted.