I Held a Shelley Manuscript

by Gregory Corso

My hands did numb to beauty
as they reached into Death and tightened!

 ~ ❇ ✾ ❈ ✾ ❇ ~

O sovereign was my touch
upon the tan-inks’s fragile page!

 ~ ❇ ✾ ❈ ✾ ❇ ~

Quickly, my eyes moved quickly,
sought for smell for dust for lace
for dry hair!

 ~ ❇ ✾ ❈ ✾ ❇ ~

I would have taken the page
breathing in the crime!
For no evidence have I wrung from dreams–
yet what triumph is there in private credence?

 ~ ❇ ✾ ❈ ✾ ❇ ~

Often, in some steep ancestral book,
when I find myself entangled with leopard-apples
and torched-skin mushrooms,
my cypressean skein outreaches the recorded age
and I, as though tipping a pitcher of milk,
pour secrecy upon the dying page.