Is it for this that Meg used to pine?
The man whose brain, delicate
with equations, tesseract mirages,
responded to commands
by government ministers
to voyage from his family toward the seraphim?
Is it because Charles never knew him
that he lies supine
in the room IT administers
or because his constitution is so delicate
it cannot command
his muscles to do the bidding of his rage?
Does the little star perished in the umbrage
of the sinister black cloud resemble him,
Calvin wonders, or does he command-
eer the vulpine
forces of the universe against the delicate
forms to which the good ministers?
When Aunt Beast ministers
to ravaged Meg and her entourage
she finds words more indelicate
than Mrs. Who, whose whim
is to quote from Great Books when spine
is lacking. Mrs. Which commands
a rich echo: The univerrsse commaands
thee … Mrs. Whatsit looks like a minister’s
wife to deflect suspicion when she crosses the pine
woods to the haunted house. Courage
without love won’t do. What is the hymn
those creatures sing from both throats & wings so delicate?
For that he was a spirit too delicate
to act their earthy and abhorr’d commands,
refusing their grand hests, they did confine him
by help of their most potent ministers
and in their most unmitigable rage
into a cloven pine …
The children breathe that delicate alpine flower
at Whatsit’s command, tessering through raging dark
to him confined in an interplanetary Soviet ministry.