James Merrill - Amsterdam lyrics

There is a city whose fair houses wizen In a strict web of streets, of waterways In which the clock tower gurgles and sways, And there desire is freed from the body's prison. Into a black impa**e deep in the maze A mirror thrusts her brilliant severed head, Mouth red and moist, and pale curls diamonded. A youth advances towards the wraith, delays, Squints through the window at a rumpled bed, Cat, the familiar, lolling on batik, The leman's person now no more unique Than any hovel uninhabited, Then turns, leaving her wrappered in a reek Of realism, back the way he came. Her j**els rekindle in their sooty frame Lights for a future sleuth of the oblique. (Once, once only to have laid absolute claim Upon that love long held in readiness, Not by the flesh in any stale undress, Nor by the faithful ghost whose lips inflame Lips curling dry, licked once to evanesce; One night one autumn, so to have taken hold Of certain volumes violent yet controlled As to leave nothing for regret, unless A strand of hair, pale auburn not quite gold On the creased cushion, being what you must bear, Guided the pa**ion to its hush, like prayer, And paler, cooler, tapered, as foretold, Into the sheer gold of nobody's hair, The fragrance of whatever we suppose Wafted, as music over what flows Into the darkened sleeper, now elsewhere...) Next day, it is myself whose image those Stunning their own on the can*l's far side Are smiling to see reel at the downglide Of one leaf, wallow, painfully recompose? My head has fallen forward open-eyed. Word of somebody's Schumann - 'like a swan That breasts a torrent of obsidian' - Idles below me in formaldehyde.