poem to savenor's market.

Stripped garlic, white peppercorns, meat
ribs-up in ice, trussed tentacles
in obscene embrace, boar jaws
in hooked wild grins, the freezer clouded
with their rapacious breath;
fish-eggs many as berry-seeds
swollen at season, green pears piled ova
warmed beneath some lusty crab,
white cheese, thin lodes like calcite,
waiting for the tremulous hand,
like the nude back
of the belle laide whose mouth perpetually beckons,
but I and my purse shrunken as an old sow's mouth
go out into the black belly of the street,
where clouds heaped like mussels
are rosy at the edge of snow.