we all want the happiness
that rhetoric and money
will never come close to,
like in the time of the
bare-back hunters
before the coming of the church
destroyed the natural flamboyance
of their uncorrupted forces,
and sugar dealing merchants
from particular ports in the low countries
hadn’t had the notion
to find how deep the ocean was,
but all that has gone now
leaving us only with driftwood
- from Revised Rudeness: Poems 1983 - 1991
