t e r r i b l y  c u n e i f o r m

Had we but world enough, and time,
This coyness, lady, were no crime.
We would sit down, and think which way
To walk, and pass our long love’s day.
Thou by the Indian Ganges’ side
Shouldst rubies find; I by the tide
Of Humber would complain. I would
Love you ten years before the flood,
And you should, if you please, refuse
Till the conversion of the Jews.
My vegetable love would grow
Vaster than empires, and more slow;
An hundred years should go to praise
Thine eyes, and on thy forehead gaze;
Two hundred to adore each breast,
But thirty thousand to the rest;
An age at least to every part,
And the last age should show your heart.
For, lady, you deserve this state,
Nor would I love at lower rate.

But at my back I always hear
Time’s winged chariot rushing near:
And yonder all before us lie
Deserts of vast eternity.
Thy beauty shall no more be found;
Nor, in thy marble vaults, shall sound
My echoing song; then worms shall try
That long-preserved virginity,
And your quaint honour turn to dust,
And into ashes all my lust:
The grave’s a fine and private place,
But none, I think, do there embrace.

Now therefore, while the youthful hue
Sits on thy skin like morning dew,
And while thy willing soul transpires
At every pore with instant fires,
Now let us sport us while we may,
And now, like amorous birds of prey,
Rather at once our time devour
Than languish in his slow-chapped power.
Let us roll all our strength, and all
Our sweetness, up into one ball,
And tear our pleasure with rough strife
Through the iron gates of life:
Thus, though we cannot make our sun
Stand still, yet we will make him run.

Theory of Beauty (Third Avenue)

Thirty-seven clocks in five tiers.

Sunset, end of a mild afternoon
the hand of winter’s never quite let go of.

Mantel, cuckoo,
rusticated, ormolu, glass-domed, moving brass balls and chimes,
porcelain, French clocks with bronze figures,
thirty-seven, ranged in the shop window,
not especially attractive,

none fine, none precious,
even to my taste individually desirable,
but studying them, then turning away

to the last warmly tinted but almost heatless sunlight,
the buildings ahead in silhouette, and then
the urge to turn back to the stepped rows

and suddenly the pre-eminently important thing
is their fulfilment of the category clock,

the remarkable divergence of means
of occupying that name, honouring the terms
and intent of it but nonetheless

presenting an extraordinarily various
set of faces to the avenue, in the warm light
of the shop. Then I or you, whoever’s

doing the looking, understands
that this is the city’s particular signature,

the range of possibilities within any single set,
and what is pleasing is not the individual clock

(goofy or kitsch, in their frostings and columns,
scrollworks and gildings) but the distance
between it and its name,

the degree to which it belongs and at the same time
pushes towards the edges of difference

– a perception that makes the window a spectacle,
thirty-seven branching aspects of a single notion,

almost absurdly divergent
in their essentially useless variety.

And when you turn away again, there on the sidewalk
is a perfect instance of the category sink,

in this case kitchen, a double stainless model
– discarded from an apartment or restaurant-
battered around the drain, humbled at its edges,

rim a little crumpled, but the interior
shining from the lifetime of scouring that’s made

this singular instance of the uncountable
manifestations of its category
in all the five boroughs, and beauty

resides not within individual objects but
in the nearly unimaginable richness of their relation.