Friday Quote: The Night of the Iguana

How calmly does the olive branch  Observe the sky begin to blanch  Without a cry, without a prayer,  With no betrayal of despair. 
 Sometime while night obscures the tree  The zenith of its life will be  Gone past forever, and from thence  A second history will commence. 
 A chronicle no longer gold,  A bargaining with mist and mould,  And finally the broken stem  The plummeting to earth; and then    An intercourse not well designed  For beings of a golden kind  Whose native green must arch above  The earth's obscene, corrupting love. 
 And still the ripe fruit and the branch  Observe the sky begin to blanch  Without a cry, without a prayer,  With no betrayal of despair. 
 O Courage, could you not as well  Select a second place to dwell,  Not only in that golden tree  But in the frightened heart of me?
The Night of the Iguana (1964)