If it be warfare, let it be mistress
and midnight up that slope,
not reticent in a weather
of withdrawal, its salmon-roe tint,
the shabby grass it grazes

but varnished to richterline
under a prismatic glare:
delinquent churn of cloudswath
and gust, calving a foreshore filth
from its respiratory lunge:

inlaid verges blear kaleidoscopic,
larkspur and loosestrife splinter
and render afire, as frontiers to scour
or confiscate, and laving dark
these latent, these restive affronts:

I was in love with a river
and its recoil - water and whither
it went is a doctrine of veil,
applique to what angle of incident
little, what lightless, unhinge.