Here at the Super Duper, in a glass tank <br />Supplied by a rill of cold fresh water <br />Running down a glass washboard at one end <br />And siphoned off at the other, and so <br />Perpetually renewed, a herd of lobster <br />Is made available to the customer <br />Who may choose whichever one he wants <br />To carry home and drop into boiling water <br />And serve with a sauce of melted butter. <br /> <br />Meanwhile, the beauty of strangeness marks <br />These creatures, who move (when they do) <br />With a slow, vague wavering of claws, <br />The somnambulist¹s effortless clambering <br />As he crawls over the shell of a dream <br />Resembling himself. Their velvet colors, <br />Mud red, bruise purple, cadaver green <br />Speckled with black, their camouflage at home, <br />Make them conspicuous here in the strong <br />Day-imitating light, the incommensurable <br />Philosophers and at the same time victims <br />Herded together in the marketplace, asleep <br />Except for certain tentative gestures <br />Of their antennae, or their imperial claws <br />Pegged shut with a whittled stick at the wrist. <br /> <br />We inlanders, buying our needful food, <br />Pause over these slow, gigantic spiders <br />That spin not. We pause and are bemused, <br />And sometimes it happens that a mind sinks down <br />To the blind abyss in a swirl of sand, goes cold <br />And archaic in a carapace of horn, <br />Thinking: There's something underneath the world. <br /> <br />The flame beneath the pot that boils the water.<br /><br />Howard Nemerov<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/the-lobster/
