Gregory Corso – “I Held a Shelley Manuscript”

August 30, 2008 at 3:48 pm (Gregory Corso, Poetry & Literature, The Beats)

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.

Gregory Corso