Andrew Jordan

The Mermiad


We endure miserie apace and want
for the Selfe
where addorsed
or Sprite Trippant love lured my seized boyhood Pan
into the girdle of greene.


Now there are manie divers Selfes
in this bodie, as manie as there are
flowers in the blaze and
the singularity moves as
a flie might move from one floret to another
in the dish of an umbel. And when the flie
is on one that is the whole flower.


Coercion has broken Unitie
into contingencies & modalities,
extempore and without autonomy,
and each flower in each floret
is a stranger, even to itself.


It is a composite psychologie, the mynde
shaped by feares and pleshures into nodes —
the Grave of the Gyaunt Beves, the Temple,
the Chaire of the Barde, the Shadie Grot
&c. — as with the umbelliferous flower —
the strongest sense of anie parte is when
we are between them, as with the girle
remembered or the girle imagined, she
is more in memorie than she that you possessed.


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