"Gourmet." Nothing is so desirable as hunger.
I do not mean the blight of shriveled hands
or the ballooned intestines of rickety children.
I mean a cheerful pain not kin to danger
but the refinement of a nurtured leisure,
a rhythm toward intensity, the right cherry
before exquisite violence.
This we may balance guilty of no grossness
with a taste for wormwood and texture of experiment
that there may be gardens within gardens all before a play
of desolation.
Then, from the odors we compress the moist conservatory
comes to bloom behind the formal door
just as we turn our faces from the smell
and close the darkening casement.