Tomorrow Morning
By Robert Penn Warren

In the morning, the rivers will blaze up blue like sulphur.
Even the maps will shrivel back in their own heat,
And metaphors will scream in the shared glory of their referents.
Truth will embrace you with tentacles like an octopus. It
Will suck your blood through a thousand suction-cups, and
The sun utter the intolerable trill of a flame-martyred canary.

Does this suggest the beginning of a new life for us all?

Or is it only, as I have heard an eminent physician remark,
A characteristic phase at the threshold of the final narcosis?

Published in The Collected Poems of Robert Penn Warren (ed. John Burt).