61 
far from the cathedral timelessly waiting 
far from your blue eyes Mary 
Mary mother of God 
Mary mother of men 
where a child with a red balloon attached to a chattering 
negress in a pink satin dress 
sways and blurs into an avenue of palms flattened on a yel 
low velvet lake that orange beaker white swans weave 
patterns of snow light until wet strips of banna plant leaves 
hush night 
Until the rainsoaked flesh on your bones rot 
Liquor winds the clown and being born and being born 
American one may say the sneer of an alligator while night 
jasimine chokes purple flesh in a bed of writhing cactus is 
to the mathematics of you projected from a Street piano 
out of New England as when the flesh rots 
upon your bones while it hails as when 
I am neatly folded away in my grave 
the sea will worm the sand always while it snows 
please omit flowers 
As when the flesh on your bones rot the sea will 
laugh mouth 
Yes 
EDWARD NAGLE 
THE MEASURE OF OURSELVES 
1 ITTLE AS I am appeased by fever, I find myself more at 
ease in that state than in one of habitual clarity. 
But no: it is only that which I lose and its valuation 
which interests me in the state of fever. 
Fever, I should say rather, has a certain curiosity for 
me. I do not confuse sickness and anxiety here; simply that 
which deforms (all morbidity) and the anguish it reveals. 
I have prayed fever to take me, I have prayed also that it 
spare me. It was not at all in the attitude of vain faltering or 
unrealized expectation. Have I not, year after year, permitted 
those decorations to imprint themselves upon my soul, and was 
it not always some crime, some voyage, some victory?