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diff --git a/78743-0.txt b/78743-0.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..23d470e --- /dev/null +++ b/78743-0.txt @@ -0,0 +1,3432 @@ +*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 78743 *** + + + + +Harmonium + + + + + Harmonium + + _by_ Wallace Stevens + + [Illustration] + + New York Alfred · A · Knopf Mcmxxiii + + + + + COPYRIGHT, 1923, BY ALFRED A. KNOPF, INC. + + _Published, September, 1923_ + + + + + _To_ + _MY WIFE_ + + + + +The poems in this book, with the exception of _The Comedian as the +Letter C_ and a few others, have been published before in _Others_, +_Secession_, _Rogue_, _The Soil_, _The Modern School_, _Broom_, +_Contact_, _The New Republic_, _The Measure_, _The Little Review_, _The +Dial_, and particularly in _Poetry: A Magazine of Verse_, of Chicago, +edited by Harriet Monroe. + + + + +Contents + + + Earthy Anecdote 15 + + Invective against Swans 16 + + In the Carolinas 17 + + The Paltry Nude Starts on a Spring Voyage 18 + + The Plot against the Giant 20 + + Infanta Marina 21 + + Domination of Black 22 + + The Snow Man 24 + + The Ordinary Women 25 + + The Load of Sugar-Cane 27 + + Le Monocle de Mon Oncle 28 + + Nuances of a Theme by Williams 34 + + Metaphors of a Magnifico 35 + + Ploughing on Sunday 36 + + Cy Est Pourtraicte, Madame Ste Ursule, et Les Unze + Mille Vierges 37 + + Hibiscus on the Sleeping Shores 39 + + Fabliau of Florida 40 + + The Doctor of Geneva 41 + + Another Weeping Woman 42 + + Homunculus et la Belle Etoile 43 + + The Comedian as the Letter C 46 + + The World without Imagination 47 + + Concerning the Thunderstorms of Yucatan 50 + + Approaching Carolina 54 + + The Idea of a Colony 58 + + A Nice Shady Home 62 + + And Daughters with Curls 66 + + From the Misery of Don Joost 70 + + O, Florida, Venereal Soil 71 + + Last Looks at the Lilacs 73 + + The Worms at Heaven’s Gate 74 + + The Jack-Rabbit 75 + + Valley Candle 76 + + Anecdote of Men by the Thousand 77 + + The Silver Plough-Boy 78 + + The Apostrophe to Vincentine 79 + + Floral Decorations for Bananas 81 + + Anecdote of Canna 83 + + Of the Manner of Addressing Clouds 84 + + Of Heaven Considered as a Tomb 85 + + Of the Surface of Things 86 + + Anecdote of the Prince of Peacocks 87 + + A High-Toned Old Christian Woman 89 + + The Place of the Solitaires 90 + + The Weeping Burgher 91 + + The Curtains in the House of the Metaphysician 92 + + Banal Sojourn 93 + + Depression before Spring 94 + + The Emperor of Ice-Cream 95 + + The Cuban Doctor 96 + + Tea at the Palaz of Hoon 97 + + Exposition of the Contents of a Cab 98 + + Disillusionment of Ten O’Clock 99 + + Sunday Morning 100 + + The Virgin Carrying a Lantern 105 + + Stars at Tallapoosa 106 + + Explanation 107 + + Six Significant Landscapes 108 + + Bantams in Pine-Woods 111 + + Anecdote of the Jar 112 + + Palace of the Babies 113 + + Frogs Eat Butterflies. Snakes Eat Frogs. Hogs + Eat Snakes. Men Eat Hogs 114 + + Jasmine’s Beautiful Thoughts underneath the Willow 115 + + Cortège for Rosenbloom 116 + + Tattoo 118 + + The Bird with the Coppery, Keen Claws 119 + + Life Is Motion 120 + + Architecture 121 + + The Wind Shifts 124 + + Colloquy with a Polish Aunt 125 + + Gubbinal 126 + + Two Figures in Dense Violet Night 127 + + Theory 128 + + To the One of Fictive Music 129 + + Hymn from a Watermelon Pavilion 131 + + Peter Quince at the Clavier 132 + + Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird 135 + + Nomad Exquisite 138 + + Tea 139 + + To the Roaring Wind 140 + + + + +Harmonium + + + + +Earthy Anecdote + + + Every time the bucks went clattering + Over Oklahoma + A firecat bristled in the way. + + Wherever they went, + They went clattering, + Until they swerved + In a swift, circular line + To the right, + Because of the firecat. + + Or until they swerved + In a swift, circular line + To the left, + Because of the firecat. + + The bucks clattered. + The firecat went leaping, + To the right, to the left, + And + Bristled in the way. + + Later, the firecat closed his bright eyes + And slept. + + + + +Invective against Swans + + + The soul, O ganders, flies beyond the parks + And far beyond the discords of the wind. + + A bronze rain from the sun descending marks + The death of summer, which that time endures + + Like one who scrawls a listless testament + Of golden quirks and Paphian caricatures, + + Bequeathing your white feathers to the moon + And giving your bland motions to the air. + + Behold, already on the long parades + The crows anoint the statues with their dirt. + + And the soul, O ganders, being lonely, flies + Beyond your chilly chariots, to the skies. + + + + +In the Carolinas + + + The lilacs wither in the Carolinas. + Already the butterflies flutter above the cabins. + Already the new-born children interpret love + In the voices of mothers. + + Timeless mother, + How is it that your aspic nipples + For once vent honey? + + _The pine-tree sweetens my body. + The white iris beautifies me._ + + + + +The Paltry Nude Starts on a Spring Voyage + + + But not on a shell, she starts, + Archaic, for the sea. + But on the first-found weed + She scuds the glitters, + Noiselessly, like one more wave. + + She too is discontent + And would have purple stuff upon her arms, + Tired of the salty harbors, + Eager for the brine and bellowing + Of the high interiors of the sea. + + The wind speeds her, + Blowing upon her hands + And watery back. + She touches the clouds, where she goes + In the circle of her traverse of the sea. + + Yet this is meagre play + In the scurry and water-shine, + As her heels foam-- + Not as when the goldener nude + Of a later day + + Will go, like the centre of sea-green pomp, + In an intenser calm, + Scullion of fate, + Across the spick torrent, ceaselessly, + Upon her irretrievable way. + + + + +The Plot against the Giant + + +_First Girl_ + + When this yokel comes maundering, + Whetting his hacker, + I shall run before him, + Diffusing the civilest odors + Out of geraniums and unsmelled flowers. + It will check him. + + +_Second Girl_ + + I shall run before him, + Arching cloths besprinkled with colors + As small as fish-eggs. + The threads + Will abash him. + + +_Third Girl_ + + Oh, la ... le pauvre! + I shall run before him, + With a curious puffing. + He will bend his ear then. + I shall whisper + Heavenly labials in a world of gutturals. + It will undo him. + + + + +Infanta Marina + + + Her terrace was the sand + And the palms and the twilight. + + She made of the motions of her wrist + The grandiose gestures + Of her thought. + + The rumpling of the plumes + Of this creature of the evening + Came to be sleights of sails + Over the sea. + + And thus she roamed + In the roamings of her fan, + + Partaking of the sea, + And of the evening, + As they flowed around + And uttered their subsiding sound. + + + + +Domination of Black + + + At night, by the fire, + The colors of the bushes + And of the fallen leaves, + Repeating themselves, + Turned in the room, + Like the leaves themselves + Turning in the wind. + Yes: but the color of the heavy hemlocks + Came striding. + And I remembered the cry of the peacocks. + + The colors of their tails + Were like the leaves themselves + Turning in the wind, + In the twilight wind. + They swept over the room, + Just as they flew from the boughs of the hemlocks + Down to the ground. + I heard them cry--the peacocks. + Was it a cry against the twilight + Or against the leaves themselves + Turning in the wind, + Turning as the flames + Turned in the fire, + Turning as the tails of the peacocks + Turned in the loud fire, + Loud as the hemlocks + Full of the cry of the peacocks? + Or was it a cry against the hemlocks? + + Out of the window, + I saw how the planets gathered + Like the leaves themselves + Turning in the wind. + I saw how the night came, + Came striding like the color of the heavy hemlocks. + I felt afraid. + And I remembered the cry of the peacocks. + + + + +The Snow Man + + + One must have a mind of winter + To regard the frost and the boughs + Of the pine-trees crusted with snow; + + And have been cold a long time + To behold the junipers shagged with ice, + The spruces rough in the distant glitter + + Of the January sun; and not to think + Of any misery in the sound of the wind, + In the sound of a few leaves, + + Which is the sound of the land + Full of the same wind + That is blowing in the same bare place + + For the listener, who listens in the snow, + And, nothing himself, beholds + Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is. + + + + +The Ordinary Women + + + Then from their poverty they rose, + From dry catarrhs, and to guitars + They flitted + Through the palace walls. + + They flung monotony behind, + Turned from their want, and, nonchalant, + They crowded + The nocturnal halls. + + The lacquered loges huddled there + Mumbled zay-zay and a-zay, a-zay. + The moonlight + Fubbed the girandoles. + + And the cold dresses that they wore, + In the vapid haze of the window-bays, + Were tranquil + As they leaned and looked + + From the window-sills at the alphabets, + At beta b and gamma g, + To study + The canting curlicues + + Of heaven and of the heavenly script. + And there they read of marriage-bed. + Ti-lill-o! + And they read right long. + + The gaunt guitarists on the strings + Rumbled a-day and a-day, a-day. + The moonlight + Rose on the beachy floors. + + How explicit the coiffures became, + The diamond point, the sapphire point, + The sequins + Of the civil fans! + + Insinuations of desire, + Puissant speech, alike in each, + Cried quittance + To the wickless halls. + + Then from their poverty they rose, + From dry guitars, and to catarrhs + They flitted + Through the palace walls. + + + + +The Load of Sugar-Cane + + + The going of the glade-boat + Is like water flowing; + + Like water flowing + Through the green saw-grass, + Under the rainbows; + + Under the rainbows + That are like birds, + Turning, bedizened, + + While the wind still whistles + As kildeer do, + + When they rise + At the red turban + Of the boatman. + + + + +Le Monocle de Mon Oncle + + +I + + “Mother of heaven, regina of the clouds, + O sceptre of the sun, crown of the moon, + There is not nothing, no, no, never nothing, + Like the clashed edges of two words that kill.” + And so I mocked her in magnificent measure. + Or was it that I mocked myself alone? + I wish that I might be a thinking stone. + The sea of spuming thought foists up again + The radiant bubble that she was. And then + A deep up-pouring from some saltier well + Within me, bursts its watery syllable. + + +II + + A red bird flies across the golden floor. + It is a red bird that seeks out his choir + Among the choirs of wind and wet and wing. + A torrent will fall from him when he finds. + Shall I uncrumple this much-crumpled thing? + I am a man of fortune greeting heirs; + For it has come that thus I greet the spring. + These choirs of welcome choir for me farewell. + No spring can follow past meridian. + Yet you persist with anecdotal bliss + To make believe a starry _connaissance_. + + +III + + Is it for nothing, then, that old Chinese + Sat tittivating by their mountain pools + Or in the Yangste studied out their beards? + I shall not play the flat historic scale. + You know how Utamaro’s beauties sought + The end of love in their all-speaking braids. + You know the mountainous coiffures of Bath. + Alas! Have all the barbers lived in vain + That not one curl in nature has survived? + Why, without pity on these studious ghosts, + Do you come dripping in your hair from sleep? + + +IV + + This luscious and impeccable fruit of life + Falls, it appears, of its own weight to earth. + When you were Eve, its acrid juice was sweet, + Untasted, in its heavenly, orchard air. + An apple serves as well as any skull + To be the book in which to read a round, + And is as excellent, in that it is composed + Of what, like skulls, comes rotting back to ground. + But it excels in this, that as the fruit + Of love, it is a book too mad to read + Before one merely reads to pass the time. + + +V + + In the high west there burns a furious star. + It is for fiery boys that star was set + And for sweet-smelling virgins close to them. + The measure of the intensity of love + Is measure, also, of the verve of earth. + For me, the firefly’s quick, electric stroke + Ticks tediously the time of one more year. + And you? Remember how the crickets came + Out of their mother grass, like little kin, + In the pale nights, when your first imagery + Found inklings of your bond to all that dust. + + +VI + + If men at forty will be painting lakes + The ephemeral blues must merge for them in one, + The basic slate, the universal hue. + There is a substance in us that prevails. + But in our amours amorists discern + Such fluctuations that their scrivening + Is breathless to attend each quirky turn. + When amorists grow bald, then amours shrink + Into the compass and curriculum + Of introspective exiles, lecturing. + It is a theme for Hyacinth alone. + + +VII + + The mules that angels ride come slowly down + The blazing passes, from beyond the sun. + Descensions of their tinkling bells arrive. + These muleteers are dainty of their way. + Meantime, centurions guffaw and beat + Their shrilling tankards on the table-boards. + This parable, in sense, amounts to this: + The honey of heaven may or may not come, + But that of earth both comes and goes at once. + Suppose these couriers brought amid their train + A damsel heightened by eternal bloom. + + +VIII + + Like a dull scholar, I behold, in love, + An ancient aspect touching a new mind. + It comes, it blooms, it bears its fruit and dies. + This trivial trope reveals a way of truth. + Our bloom is gone. We are the fruit thereof. + Two golden gourds distended on our vines, + We hang like warty squashes, streaked and rayed, + Into the autumn weather, splashed with frost, + Distorted by hale fatness, turned grotesque. + The laughing sky will see the two of us + Washed into rinds by rotting winter rains. + + +IX + + In verses wild with motion, full of din, + Loudened by cries, by clashes, quick and sure + As the deadly thought of men accomplishing + Their curious fates in war, come, celebrate + The faith of forty, ward of Cupido. + Most venerable heart, the lustiest conceit + Is not too lusty for your broadening. + I quiz all sounds, all thoughts, all everything + For the music and manner of the paladins + To make oblation fit. Where shall I find + Bravura adequate to this great hymn? + + +X + + The fops of fancy in their poems leave + Memorabilia of the mystic spouts, + Spontaneously watering their gritty soils. + I am a yeoman, as such fellows go. + I know no magic trees, no balmy boughs, + No silver-ruddy, gold-vermilion fruits. + But, after all, I know a tree that bears + A semblance to the thing I have in mind. + It stands gigantic, with a certain tip + To which all birds come sometime in their time. + But when they go that tip still tips the tree. + + +XI + + If sex were all, then every trembling hand + Could make us squeak, like dolls, the wished-for words. + But note the unconscionable treachery of fate, + That makes us weep, laugh, grunt and groan, and shout + Doleful heroics, pinching gestures forth + From madness or delight, without regard + To that first, foremost law. Anguishing hour! + Last night, we sat beside a pool of pink, + Clippered with lilies scudding the bright chromes, + Keen to the point of starlight, while a frog + Boomed from his very belly odious chords. + + +XII + + A blue pigeon it is, that circles the blue sky, + On side-long wing, around and round and round. + A white pigeon it is, that flutters to the ground, + Grown tired of flight. Like a dark rabbi, I + Observed, when young, the nature of mankind, + In lordly study. Every day, I found + Man proved a gobbet in my mincing world. + Like a rose rabbi, later, I pursued, + And still pursue, the origin and course + Of love, but until now I never knew + That fluttering things have so distinct a shade. + + + + +Nuances of a Theme by Williams + + _It’s a strange courage + you give me, ancient star:_ + + _Shine alone in the sunrise + toward which you lend no part!_ + + +I + + Shine alone, shine nakedly, shine like bronze, + that reflects neither my face nor any inner part + of my being, shine like fire, that mirrors nothing. + + +II + + Lend no part to any humanity that suffuses you in its own light. + Be not chimera of morning, + Half-man, half-star. + Be not an intelligence, + Like a widow’s bird + Or an old horse. + + + + +Metaphors of a Magnifico + + + Twenty men crossing a bridge, + Into a village, + Are twenty men crossing twenty bridges, + Into twenty villages, + Or one man + Crossing a single bridge into a village. + + This is old song + That will not declare itself ... + + Twenty men crossing a bridge, + Into a village, + Are + Twenty men crossing a bridge + Into a village. + + That will not declare itself + Yet is certain as meaning ... + + The boots of the men clump + On the boards of the bridge. + The first white wall of the village + Rises through fruit-trees. + Of what was it I was thinking? + + So the meaning escapes. + + The first white wall of the village ... + The fruit-trees.... + + + + +Ploughing on Sunday + + + The white cock’s tail + Tosses in the wind. + The turkey-cock’s tail + Glitters in the sun. + + Water in the fields. + The wind pours down. + The feathers flare + And bluster in the wind. + + Remus, blow your horn! + I’m ploughing on Sunday, + Ploughing North America. + Blow your horn! + + Tum-ti-tum, + Ti-tum-tum-tum! + The turkey-cock’s tail + Spreads to the sun. + + The white cock’s tail + Streams to the moon. + Water in the fields. + The wind pours down. + + + + +Cy Est Pourtraicte, Madame Ste Ursule, et Les Unze Mille Vierges + + + Ursula, in a garden, found + A bed of radishes. + She kneeled upon the ground + And gathered them, + With flowers around, + Blue, gold, pink, and green. + + She dressed in red and gold brocade + And in the grass an offering made + Of radishes and flowers. + + She said, “My dear, + Upon your altars, + I have placed + The marguerite and coquelicot, + And roses + Frail as April snow; + But here,” she said, + “Where none can see, + I make an offering, in the grass, + Of radishes and flowers.” + And then she wept + For fear the Lord would not accept. + + The good Lord in His garden sought + New leaf and shadowy tinct, + And they were all His thought. + He heard her low accord, + Half prayer and half ditty, + And He felt a subtle quiver, + That was not heavenly love, + Or pity. + + This is not writ + In any book. + + + + +Hibiscus on the Sleeping Shores + + + I say now, Fernando, that on that day + The mind roamed as a moth roams, + Among the blooms beyond the open sand; + + And that whatever noise the motion of the waves + Made on the sea-weeds and the covered stones + Disturbed not even the most idle ear. + + Then it was that that monstered moth + Which had lain folded against the blue + And the colored purple of the lazy sea, + + And which had drowsed along the bony shores, + Shut to the blather that the water made, + Rose up besprent and sought the flaming red + + Dabbled with yellow pollen--red as red + As the flag above the old café-- + And roamed there all the stupid afternoon. + + + + +Fabliau of Florida + + + Barque of phosphor + On the palmy beach, + + Move outward into heaven, + Into the alabasters + And night blues. + + Foam and cloud are one. + Sultry moon-monsters + Are dissolving. + + Fill your black hull + With white moonlight. + + There will never be an end + To this droning of the surf. + + + + +The Doctor of Geneva + + + The doctor of Geneva stamped the sand + That lay impounding the Pacific swell, + Patted his stove-pipe hat and tugged his shawl. + + Lacustrine man had never been assailed + By such long-rolling opulent cataracts, + Unless Racine or Bossuet held the like. + + He did not quail. A man so used to plumb + The multifarious heavens felt no awe + Before these visible, voluble delugings, + + Which yet found means to set his simmering mind + Spinning and hissing with oracular + Notations of the wild, the ruinous waste, + + Until the steeples of his city clanked and sprang + In an unburgherly apocalypse. + The doctor used his handkerchief and sighed. + + + + +Another Weeping Woman + + + Pour the unhappiness out + From your too bitter heart, + Which grieving will not sweeten. + + Poison grows in this dark. + It is in the water of tears + Its black blooms rise. + + The magnificent cause of being, + The imagination, the one reality + In this imagined world + + Leaves you + With him for whom no phantasy moves, + And you are pierced by a death. + + + + +Homunculus et la Belle Etoile + + + In the sea, Biscayne, there prinks + The young emerald, evening star, + Good light for drunkards, poets, widows, + And ladies soon to be married. + + By this light the salty fishes + Arch in the sea like tree-branches, + Going in many directions + Up and down. + + This light conducts + The thoughts of drunkards, the feelings + Of widows and trembling ladies, + The movements of fishes. + + How pleasant an existence it is + That this emerald charms philosophers, + Until they become thoughtlessly willing + To bathe their hearts in later moonlight, + + Knowing that they can bring back thought + In the night that is still to be silent, + Reflecting this thing and that, + Before they sleep! + + It is better that, as scholars, + They should think hard in the dark cuffs + Of voluminous cloaks, + And shave their heads and bodies. + + It might well be that their mistress + Is no gaunt fugitive phantom. + She might, after all, be a wanton, + Abundantly beautiful, eager, + + Fecund, + From whose being by starlight, on sea-coast, + The innermost good of their seeking + Might come in the simplest of speech. + + It is a good light, then, for those + That know the ultimate Plato, + Tranquillizing with this jewel + The torments of confusion. + + + + +The Comedian as the Letter C + + +I + +The World without Imagination + + Nota: man is the intelligence of his soil, + The sovereign ghost. As such, the Socrates + Of snails, musician of pears, principium + And lex. Sed quaeritur: is this same wig + Of things, this nincompated pedagogue, + Preceptor to the sea? Crispin at sea + Created, in his day, a touch of doubt. + An eye most apt in gelatines and jupes, + Berries of villages, a barber’s eye, + An eye of land, of simple salad-beds, + Of honest quilts, the eye of Crispin, hung + On porpoises, instead of apricots, + And on silentious porpoises, whose snouts + Dibbled in waves that were mustachios, + Inscrutable hair in an inscrutable world. + + One eats one paté, even of salt, quotha. + It was not so much the lost terrestrial, + The snug hibernal from that sea and salt, + That century of wind in a single puff. + What counted was mythology of self, + Blotched out beyond unblotching. Crispin, + The lutanist of fleas, the knave, the thane, + The ribboned stick, the bellowing breeches, cloak + Of China, cap of Spain, imperative haw + Of hum, inquisitorial botanist, + And general lexicographer of mute + And maidenly greenhorns, now beheld himself, + A skinny sailor peering in the sea-glass. + What word split up in clickering syllables + And storming under multitudinous tones + Was name for this short-shanks in all that brunt? + Crispin was washed away by magnitude. + The whole of life that still remained in him + Dwindled to one sound strumming in his ear, + Ubiquitous concussion, slap and sigh, + Polyphony beyond his baton’s thrust. + + Could Crispin stem verboseness in the sea, + The old age of a watery realist, + Triton, dissolved in shifting diaphanes + Of blue and green? A wordy, watery age + That whispered to the sun’s compassion, made + A convocation, nightly, of the sea-stars, + And on the clopping foot-ways of the moon + Lay grovelling. Triton incomplicate with that + Which made him Triton, nothing left of him, + Except in faint, memorial gesturings, + That were like arms and shoulders in the waves, + Here, something in the rise and fall of wind + That seemed hallucinating horn, and here, + A sunken voice, both of remembering + And of forgetfulness, in alternate strain. + Just so an ancient Crispin was dissolved. + The valet in the tempest was annulled. + Bordeaux to Yucatan, Havana next, + And then to Carolina. Simple jaunt. + Crispin, merest minuscule in the gales, + Dejected his manner to the turbulence. + The salt hung on his spirit like a frost, + The dead brine melted in him like a dew + Of winter, until nothing of himself + Remained, except some starker, barer self + In a starker, barer world, in which the sun + Was not the sun because it never shone + With bland complaisance on pale parasols, + Beetled, in chapels, on the chaste bouquets. + Against his pipping sounds a trumpet cried + Celestial sneering boisterously. Crispin + Became an introspective voyager. + + Here was the veritable ding an sich, at last, + Crispin confronting it, a vocable thing, + But with a speech belched out of hoary darks + Noway resembling his, a visible thing, + And excepting negligible Triton, free + From the unavoidable shadow of himself + That lay elsewhere around him. Severance + Was clear. The last distortion of romance + Forsook the insatiable egotist. The sea + Severs not only lands but also selves. + Here was no help before reality. + Crispin beheld and Crispin was made new. + The imagination, here, could not evade, + In poems of plums, the strict austerity + Of one vast, subjugating, final tone. + The drenching of stale lives no more fell down. + What was this gaudy, gusty panoply? + Out of what swift destruction did it spring? + It was caparison of wind and cloud + And something given to make whole among + The ruses that were shattered by the large. + + +II + +Concerning the Thunderstorms of Yucatan + + In Yucatan, the Maya sonneteers + Of the Caribbean amphitheatre, + In spite of hawk and falcon, green toucan + And jay, still to the night-bird made their plea, + As if raspberry tanagers in palms, + High up in orange air, were barbarous. + But Crispin was too destitute to find + In any commonplace the sought-for aid. + He was a man made vivid by the sea, + A man come out of luminous traversing, + Much trumpeted, made desperately clear, + Fresh from discoveries of tidal skies, + To whom oracular rockings gave no rest. + Into a savage color he went on. + + How greatly had he grown in his demesne, + This auditor of insects! He that saw + The stride of vanishing autumn in a park + By way of decorous melancholy; he + That wrote his couplet yearly to the spring, + As dissertation of profound delight, + Stopping, on voyage, in a land of snakes, + Found his vicissitudes had much enlarged + His apprehension, made him intricate + In moody rucks, and difficult and strange + In all desires, his destitution’s mark. + He was in this as other freemen are, + Sonorous nutshells rattling inwardly. + His violence was for aggrandizement + And not for stupor, such as music makes + For sleepers halfway waking. He perceived + That coolness for his heat came suddenly, + And only, in the fables that he scrawled + With his own quill, in its indigenous dew, + Of an aesthetic tough, diverse, untamed, + Incredible to prudes, the mint of dirt, + Green barbarism turning paradigm. + Crispin foresaw a curious promenade + Or, nobler, sensed an elemental fate, + And elemental potencies and pangs, + And beautiful barenesses as yet unseen, + Making the most of savagery of palms, + Of moonlight on the thick, cadaverous bloom + That yuccas breed, and of the panther’s tread. + The fabulous and its intrinsic verse + Came like two spirits parleying, adorned + In radiance from the Atlantic coign, + For Crispin and his quill to catechize. + But they came parleying of such an earth, + So thick with sides and jagged lops of green, + So intertwined with serpent-kin encoiled + Among the purple tufts, the scarlet crowns, + Scenting the jungle in their refuges, + So streaked with yellow, blue and green and red + In beak and bud and fruity gobbet-skins, + That earth was like a jostling festival + Of seeds grown fat, too juicily opulent, + Expanding in the gold’s maternal warmth. + + So much for that. The affectionate emigrant found + A new reality in parrot-squawks. + Yet let that trifle pass. Now, as this odd + Discoverer walked through the harbor streets + Inspecting the cabildo, the façade + Of the cathedral, making notes, he heard + A rumbling, west of Mexico, it seemed, + Approaching like a gasconade of drums. + The white cabildo darkened, the façade, + As sullen as the sky, was swallowed up + In swift, successive shadows, dolefully. + The rumbling broadened as it fell. The wind, + Tempestuous clarion, with heavy cry, + Came bluntly thundering, more terrible + Than the revenge of music on bassoons. + Gesticulating lightning, mystical, + Made pallid flitter. Crispin, here, took flight. + An annotator has his scruples, too. + He knelt in the cathedral with the rest, + This connoisseur of elemental fate, + Aware of exquisite thought. The storm was one + Of many proclamations of the kind, + Proclaiming something harsher than he learned + From hearing signboards whimper in cold nights + Or seeing the midsummer artifice + Of heat upon his pane. This was the span + Of force, the quintessential fact, the note + Of Vulcan, that a valet seeks to own, + The thing that makes him envious in phrase. + + And while the torrent on the roof still droned + He felt the Andean breath. His mind was free + And more than free, elate, intent, profound + And studious of a self possessing him, + That was not in him in the crusty town + From which he sailed. Beyond him, westward, lay + The mountainous ridges, purple balustrades, + In which the thunder, lapsing in its clap, + Let down gigantic quavers of its voice, + For Crispin to vociferate again. + + +III + +Approaching Carolina + + The book of moonlight is not written yet + Nor half begun, but, when it is, leave room + For Crispin, fagot in the lunar fire, + Who, in the hubbub of his pilgrimage + Through sweating changes, never could forget + That wakefulness or meditating sleep, + In which the sulky strophes willingly + Bore up, in time, the somnolent, deep songs. + Leave room, therefore, in that unwritten book + For the legendary moonlight that once burned + In Crispin’s mind above a continent. + America was always north to him, + A northern west or western north, but north, + And thereby polar, polar-purple, chilled + And lank, rising and slumping from a sea + Of hardy foam, receding flatly, spread + In endless ledges, glittering, submerged + And cold in a boreal mistiness of the moon. + The spring came there in clinking pannicles + Of half-dissolving frost, the summer came, + If ever, whisked and wet, not ripening, + Before the winter’s vacancy returned. + The myrtle, if the myrtle ever bloomed, + Was like a glacial pink upon the air. + The green palmettoes in crepuscular ice + Clipped frigidly blue-black meridians, + Morose chiaroscuro, gauntly drawn. + + How many poems he denied himself + In his observant progress, lesser things + Than the relentless contact he desired; + How many sea-masks he ignored; what sounds + He shut out from his tempering ear; what thoughts, + Like jades affecting the sequestered bride; + And what descants, he sent to banishment! + Perhaps the Arctic moonlight really gave + The liaison, the blissful liaison, + Between himself and his environment, + Which was, and is, chief motive, first delight, + For him, and not for him alone. It seemed + Illusive, faint, more mist than moon, perverse, + Wrong as a divagation to Peking, + To him that postulated as his theme + The vulgar, as his theme and hymn and flight, + A passionately niggling nightingale. + Moonlight was an evasion, or, if not, + A minor meeting, facile, delicate. + + Thus he conceived his voyaging to be + An up and down between two elements, + A fluctuating between sun and moon, + A sally into gold and crimson forms, + As on this voyage, out of goblinry, + And then retirement like a turning back + And sinking down to the indulgences + That in the moonlight have their habitude. + But let these backward lapses, if they would, + Grind their seductions on him, Crispin knew + It was a flourishing tropic he required + For his refreshment, an abundant zone, + Prickly and obdurate, dense, harmonious + Yet with a harmony not rarefied + Nor fined for the inhibited instruments + Of over-civil stops. And thus he tossed + Between a Carolina of old time, + A little juvenile, an ancient whim, + And the visible, circumspect presentment drawn + From what he saw across his vessel’s prow. + + He came. The poetic hero without palms + Or jugglery, without regalia. + And as he came he saw that it was spring, + A time abhorrent to the nihilist + Or searcher for the fecund minimum. + The moonlight fiction disappeared. The spring, + Although contending featly in its veils, + Irised in dew and early fragrancies, + Was gemmy marionette to him that sought + A sinewy nakedness. A river bore + The vessel inward. Tilting up his nose, + He inhaled the rancid rosin, burly smells + Of dampened lumber, emanations blown + From warehouse doors, the gustiness of ropes, + Decays of sacks, and all the arrant stinks + That helped him round his rude aesthetic out. + He savored rankness like a sensualist. + He marked the marshy ground around the dock, + The crawling railroad spur, the rotten fence, + Curriculum for the marvellous sophomore. + It purified. It made him see how much + Of what he saw he never saw at all. + He gripped more closely the essential prose + As being, in a world so falsified, + The one integrity for him, the one + Discovery still possible to make, + To which all poems were incident, unless + That prose should wear a poem’s guise at last. + + +IV + +The Idea of a Colony + + Nota: his soil is man’s intelligence. + That’s better. That’s worth crossing seas to find. + Crispin in one laconic phrase laid bare + His cloudy drift and planned a colony. + Exit the mental moonlight, exit lex, + Rex and principium, exit the whole + Shebang. Exeunt omnes. Here was prose + More exquisite than any tumbling verse: + A still new continent in which to dwell. + What was the purpose of his pilgrimage, + Whatever shape it took in Crispin’s mind, + If not, when all is said, to drive away + The shadow of his fellows from the skies, + And, from their stale intelligence released, + To make a new intelligence prevail? + Hence the reverberations in the words + Of his first central hymns, the celebrants + Of rankest trivia, tests of the strength + Of his aesthetic, his philosophy, + The more invidious, the more desired. + The florist asking aid from cabbages, + The rich man going bare, the paladin + Afraid, the blind man as astronomer, + The appointed power unwielded from disdain. + + His western voyage ended and began. + The torment of fastidious thought grew slack, + Another, still more bellicose, came on. + He, therefore, wrote his prolegomena, + And, being full of the caprice, inscribed + Commingled souvenirs and prophecies. + He made a singular collation. Thus: + The natives of the rain are rainy men. + Although they paint effulgent, azure lakes, + And April hillsides wooded white and pink, + Their azure has a cloudy edge, their white + And pink, the water bright that dogwood bears. + And in their music showering sounds intone. + On what strange froth does the gross Indian dote, + What Eden sapling gum, what honeyed gore, + What pulpy dram distilled of innocence, + That streaking gold should speak in him + Or bask within his images and words? + If these rude instances impeach themselves + By force of rudeness, let the principle + Be plain. For application Crispin strove, + Abhorring Turk as Esquimau, the lute + As the marimba, the magnolia as rose. + + Upon these premises propounding, he + Projected a colony that should extend + To the dusk of a whistling south below the south, + A comprehensive island hemisphere. + The man in Georgia waking among pines + Should be pine-spokesman. The responsive man, + Planting his pristine cores in Florida, + Should prick thereof, not on the psaltery, + But on the banjo’s categorical gut, + Tuck tuck, while the flamingos flapped his bays. + Sepulchral señors, bibbing pale mescal, + Oblivious to the Aztec almanacs, + Should make the intricate Sierra scan. + And dark Brazilians in their cafés, + Musing immaculate, pampean dits, + Should scrawl a vigilant anthology, + To be their latest, lucent paramour. + These are the broadest instances. Crispin, + Progenitor of such extensive scope, + Was not indifferent to smart detail. + The melon should have apposite ritual, + Performed in verd apparel, and the peach, + When its black branches came to bud, belle day, + Should have an incantation. And again, + When piled on salvers its aroma steeped + The summer, it should have a sacrament + And celebration. Shrewd novitiates + Should be the clerks of our experience. + + These bland excursions into time to come, + Related in romance to backward flights, + However prodigal, however proud, + Contained in their afflatus the reproach + That first drove Crispin to his wandering. + He could not be content with counterfeit, + With masquerade of thought, with hapless words + That must belie the racking masquerade, + With fictive flourishes that preordained + His passion’s permit, hang of coat, degree + Of buttons, measure of his salt. Such trash + Might help the blind, not him, serenely sly. + It irked beyond his patience. Hence it was, + Preferring text to gloss, he humbly served + Grotesque apprenticeship to chance event, + A clown, perhaps, but an aspiring clown. + There is a monotonous babbling in our dreams + That makes them our dependent heirs, the heirs + Of dreamers buried in our sleep, and not + The oncoming fantasies of better birth. + The apprentice knew these dreamers. If he dreamed + Their dreams, he did it in a gingerly way. + All dreams are vexing. Let them be expunged. + But let the rabbit run, the cock declaim. + + Trinket pasticcio, flaunting skyey sheets, + With Crispin as the tiptoe cozener? + No, no: veracious page on page, exact. + + +V + +A Nice Shady Home + + Crispin as hermit, pure and capable, + Dwelt in the land. Perhaps if discontent + Had kept him still the pricking realist, + Choosing his element from droll confect + Of was and is and shall or ought to be, + Beyond Bordeaux, beyond Havana, far + Beyond carked Yucatan, he might have come + To colonize his polar planterdom + And jig his chits upon a cloudy knee. + But his emprize to that idea soon sped. + Crispin dwelt in the land and dwelling there + Slid from his continent by slow recess + To things within his actual eye, alert + To the difficulty of rebellious thought + When the sky is blue. The blue infected will. + It may be that the yarrow in his fields + Sealed pensive purple under its concern. + But day by day, now this thing and now that + Confined him, while it cosseted, condoned, + Little by little, as if the suzerain soil + Abashed him by carouse to humble yet + Attach. It seemed haphazard denouement. + He first, as realist, admitted that + Whoever hunts a matinal continent + May, after all, stop short before a plum + And be content and still be realist. + The words of things entangle and confuse. + The plum survives its poems. It may hang + In the sunshine placidly, colored by ground + Obliquities of those who pass beneath, + Harlequined and mazily dewed and mauved + In bloom. Yet it survives in its own form, + Beyond these changes, good, fat, guzzly fruit. + So Crispin hasped on the surviving form, + For him, of shall or ought to be in is. + + Was he to bray this in profoundest brass + Arointing his dreams with fugal requiems? + Was he to company vastest things defunct + With a blubber of tom-toms harrowing the sky? + Scrawl a tragedian’s testament? Prolong + His active force in an inactive dirge, + Which, let the tall musicians call and call, + Should merely call him dead? Pronounce amen + Through choirs infolded to the outmost clouds? + Because he built a cabin who once planned + Loquacious columns by the ructive sea? + Because he turned to salad-beds again? + Jovial Crispin, in calamitous crape? + Should he lay by the personal and make + Of his own fate an instance of all fate? + What is one man among so many men? + What are so many men in such a world? + Can one man think one thing and think it long? + Can one man be one thing and be it long? + The very man despising honest quilts + Lies quilted to his poll in his despite. + For realists, what is is what should be. + + And so it came, his cabin shuffled up, + His trees were planted, his duenna brought + Her prismy blonde and clapped her in his hands, + The curtains flittered and the door was closed. + Crispin, magister of a single room, + Latched up the night. So deep a sound fell down + It was as if the solitude concealed + And covered him and his congenial sleep. + So deep a sound fell down it grew to be + A long soothsaying silence down and down. + The crickets beat their tambours in the wind, + Marching a motionless march, custodians. + + In the presto of the morning, Crispin trod, + Each day, still curious, but in a round + Less prickly and much more condign than that + He once thought necessary. Like Candide, + Yeoman and grub, but with a fig in sight, + And cream for the fig and silver for the cream, + A blonde to tip the silver and to taste + The rapey gouts. Good star, how that to be + Annealed them in their cabin ribaldries! + Yet the quotidian saps philosophers + And men like Crispin like them in intent, + If not in will, to track the knaves of thought. + But the quotidian composed as his, + Of breakfast ribands, fruits laid in their leaves, + The tomtit and the cassia and the rose, + Although the rose was not the noble thorn + Of crinoline spread, but of a pining sweet, + Composed of evenings like cracked shutters flung + Upon the rumpling bottomness, and nights + In which those frail custodians watched, + Indifferent to the tepid summer cold, + While he poured out upon the lips of her + That lay beside him, the quotidian + Like this, saps like the sun, true fortuner. + For all it takes it gives a humped return + Exchequering from piebald fiscs unkeyed. + + +VI + +And Daughters with Curls + + Portentous enunciation, syllable + To blessed syllable affined, and sound + Bubbling felicity in cantilene, + Prolific and tormenting tenderness + Of music, as it comes to unison, + Forgather and bell boldly Crispin’s last + Deduction. Thrum with a proud douceur + His grand pronunciamento and devise. + + The chits came for his jigging, bluet-eyed, + Hands without touch yet touching poignantly, + Leaving no room upon his cloudy knee, + Prophetic joint, for its diviner young. + The return to social nature, once begun, + Anabasis or slump, ascent or chute, + Involved him in midwifery so dense + His cabin counted as philactary, + Then place of vexing palankeens, then haunt + Of children nibbling at the sugared void, + Infants yet eminently old, then dome + And halidom for the unbraided femes, + Green crammers of the green fruits of the world, + Bidders and biders for its ecstasies, + True daughters both of Crispin and his clay. + All this with many mulctings of the man, + Effective colonizer sharply stopped + In the door-yard by his own capacious bloom. + But that this bloom grown riper, showing nibs + Of its eventual roundness, puerile tints + Of spiced and weathery rouges, should complex + The stopper to indulgent fatalist + Was unforeseen. First Crispin smiled upon + His goldenest demoiselle, inhabitant, + She seemed, of a country of the capuchins, + So delicately blushed, so humbly eyed, + Attentive to a coronal of things + Secret and singular. Second, upon + A second similar counterpart, a maid + Most sisterly to the first, not yet awake + Excepting to the motherly footstep, but + Marvelling sometimes at the shaken sleep. + Then third, a thing still flaxen in the light, + A creeper under jaunty leaves. And fourth, + Mere blusteriness that gewgaws jollified, + All din and gobble, blasphemously pink. + A few years more and the vermeil capuchin + Gave to the cabin, lordlier than it was, + The dulcet omen fit for such a house. + The second sister dallying was shy + To fetch the one full-pinioned one himself + Out of her botches, hot embosomer. + The third one gaping at the orioles + Lettered herself demurely as became + A pearly poetess, peaked for rhapsody. + The fourth, pent now, a digit curious. + Four daughters in a world too intricate + In the beginning, four blithe instruments + Of differing struts, four voices several + In couch, four more personæ, intimate + As buffo, yet divers, four mirrors blue + That should be silver, four accustomed seeds + Hinting incredible hues, four self-same lights + That spread chromatics in hilarious dark, + Four questioners and four sure answerers. + + Crispin concocted doctrine from the rout. + The world, a turnip once so readily plucked, + Sacked up and carried overseas, daubed out + Of its ancient purple, pruned to the fertile main, + And sown again by the stiffest realist, + Came reproduced in purple, family font, + The same insoluble lump. The fatalist + Stepped in and dropped the chuckling down his craw, + Without grace or grumble. Score this anecdote + Invented for its pith, not doctrinal + In form though in design, as Crispin willed, + Disguised pronunciamento, summary, + Autumn’s compendium, strident in itself + But muted, mused, and perfectly revolved + In those portentous accents, syllables, + And sounds of music coming to accord + Upon his law, like their inherent sphere, + Seraphic proclamations of the pure + Delivered with a deluging onwardness. + Or if the music sticks, if the anecdote + Is false, if Crispin is a profitless + Philosopher, beginning with green brag, + Concluding fadedly, if as a man + Prone to distemper he abates in taste, + Fickle and fumbling, variable, obscure, + Glozing his life with after-shining flicks, + Illuminating, from a fancy gorged + By apparition, plain and common things, + Sequestering the fluster from the year, + Making gulped potions from obstreperous drops, + And so distorting, proving what he proves + Is nothing, what can all this matter since + The relation comes, benignly, to its end? + + So may the relation of each man be clipped. + + + + +From the Misery of Don Joost + + + I have finished my combat with the sun; + And my body, the old animal, + Knows nothing more. + + The powerful seasons bred and killed, + And were themselves the genii + Of their own ends. + + Oh, but the very self of the storm + Of sun and slaves, breeding and death, + The old animal, + + The senses and feeling, the very sound + And sight, and all there was of the storm, + Knows nothing more. + + + + +O, Florida, Venereal Soil + + + A few things for themselves, + Convolvulus and coral, + Buzzards and live-moss, + Tiestas from the keys, + A few things for themselves, + Florida, venereal soil, + Disclose to the lover. + + The dreadful sundry of this world, + The Cuban, Polodowsky, + The Mexican women, + The negro undertaker + Killing the time between corpses + Fishing for crayfish ... + Virgin of boorish births, + + Swiftly in the nights, + In the porches of Key West, + Behind the bougainvilleas, + After the guitar is asleep, + Lasciviously as the wind, + You come tormenting, + Insatiable, + + When you might sit, + A scholar of darkness, + Sequestered over the sea, + Wearing a clear tiara + Of red and blue and red, + Sparkling, solitary, still, + In the high sea-shadow. + + Donna, donna, dark, + Stooping in indigo gown + And cloudy constellations, + Conceal yourself or disclose + Fewest things to the lover-- + A hand that bears a thick-leaved fruit, + A pungent bloom against your shade. + + + + +Last Looks at the Lilacs + + + To what good, in the alleys of the lilacs, + O caliper, do you scratch your buttocks + And tell the divine ingénue, your companion, + That this bloom is the bloom of soap + And this fragrance the fragrance of vegetal? + + Do you suppose that she cares a tick, + In this hymeneal air, what it is + That marries her innocence thus, + So that her nakedness is near, + Or that she will pause at scurrilous words? + + Poor buffo! Look at the lavender + And look your last and look still steadily, + And say how it comes that you see + Nothing but trash and that you no longer feel + Her body quivering in the Floréal + + Toward the cool night and its fantastic star, + Prime paramour and belted paragon, + Well-booted, rugged, arrogantly male, + Patron and imager of the gold Don John, + Who will embrace her before summer comes. + + + + +The Worms at Heaven’s Gate + + + Out of the tomb, we bring Badroulbadour, + Within our bellies, we her chariot. + Here is an eye. And here are, one by one, + The lashes of that eye and its white lid. + Here is the cheek on which that lid declined, + And, finger after finger, here, the hand, + The genius of that cheek. Here are the lips, + The bundle of the body and the feet. + + * * * * * + + Out of the tomb we bring Badroulbadour. + + + + +The Jack-Rabbit + + + In the morning, + The jack-rabbit sang to the Arkansaw. + He carolled in caracoles + On the feat sandbars. + + The black man said, + “Now, grandmother, + Crochet me this buzzard + On your winding-sheet, + And do not forget his wry neck + After the winter.” + + The black man said, + “Look out, O caroller, + The entrails of the buzzard + Are rattling.” + + + + +Valley Candle + + + My candle burned alone in an immense valley. + Beams of the huge night converged upon it, + Until the wind blew. + Then beams of the huge night + Converged upon its image, + Until the wind blew. + + + + +Anecdote of Men by the Thousand + + + The soul, he said, is composed + Of the external world. + + There are men of the East, he said, + Who are the East. + There are men of a province + Who are that province + There are men of a valley + Who are that valley. + + There are men whose words + Are as natural sounds + Of their places + As the cackle of toucans + In the place of toucans. + + The mandoline is the instrument + Of a place. + + Are there mandolines of western mountains? + Are there mandolines of northern moonlight? + + The dress of a woman of Lhassa, + In its place, + Is an invisible element of that place + Made visible. + + + + +The Silver Plough-Boy + + + A black figure dances in a black field. + It seizes a sheet, from the ground, from a bush, as if spread + there by some wash-woman for the night. + It wraps the sheet around its body, until the black figure + is silver. + It dances down a furrow, in the early light, back of a crazy + plough, the green blades following. + How soon the silver fades in the dust! How soon the black + figure slips from the wrinkled sheet! How softly the + sheet falls to the ground! + + + + +The Apostrophe to Vincentine + + +I + + I figured you as nude between + Monotonous earth and dark blue sky. + It made you seem so small and lean + And nameless, + Heavenly Vincentine. + + +II + + I saw you then, as warm as flesh, + Brunette, + But yet not too brunette, + As warm, as clean. + Your dress was green, + Was whited green, + Green Vincentine. + + +III + + Then you came walking, + In a group + Of human others, + Voluble. + Yes: you came walking, + Vincentine. + Yes: you came talking. + + +IV + + And what I knew you felt + Came then. + Monotonous earth I saw become + Illimitable spheres of you, + And that white animal, so lean, + Turned Vincentine, + Turned heavenly Vincentine, + And that white animal, so lean, + Turned heavenly, heavenly Vincentine. + + + + +Floral Decorations for Bananas + + + Well, nuncle, this plainly won’t do. + These insolent, linear peels + And sullen, hurricane shapes + Won’t do with your eglantine. + They require something serpentine. + Blunt yellow in such a room! + + You should have had plums tonight, + In an eighteenth-century dish, + And pettifogging buds, + For the women of primrose and purl, + Each one in her decent curl. + Good God! What a precious light! + + But bananas hacked and hunched ... + The table was set by an ogre, + His eye on an outdoor gloom + And a stiff and noxious place. + Pile the bananas on planks. + The women will be all shanks + And bangles and slatted eyes. + + And deck the bananas in leaves + Plucked from the Carib trees, + Fibrous and dangling down, + Oozing cantankerous gum + Out of their purple maws, + Darting out of their purple craws + Their musky and tingling tongues. + + + + +Anecdote of Canna + + + Huge are the canna in the dreams of + X, the mighty thought, the mighty man. + They fill the terrace of his capitol. + + His thought sleeps not. Yet thought that wakes + In sleep may never meet another thought + Or thing.... Now day-break comes.... + + X promenades the dewy stones, + Observes the canna with a clinging eye, + Observes and then continues to observe. + + + + +Of the Manner of Addressing Clouds + + + Gloomy grammarians in golden gowns, + Meekly you keep the mortal rendezvous, + Eliciting the still sustaining pomps + Of speech which are like music so profound + They seem an exaltation without sound. + Funest philosophers and ponderers, + Their evocations are the speech of clouds. + So speech of your processionals returns + In the casual evocations of your tread + Across the stale, mysterious seasons. These + Are the music of meet resignation; these + The responsive, still sustaining pomps for you + To magnify, if in that drifting waste + You are to be accompanied by more + Than mute bare splendors of the sun and moon. + + + + +Of Heaven Considered as a Tomb + + + What word have you, interpreters, of men + Who in the tomb of heaven walk by night, + The darkened ghosts of our old comedy? + Do they believe they range the gusty cold, + With lanterns borne aloft to light the way, + Freemen of death, about and still about + To find whatever it is they seek? Or does + That burial, pillared up each day as porte + And spiritous passage into nothingness, + Foretell each night the one abysmal night, + When the host shall no more wander, nor the light + Of the steadfast lanterns creep across the dark? + Make hue among the dark comedians, + Halloo them in the topmost distances + For answer from their icy Elysée. + + + + +Of the Surface of Things + + +I + + In my room, the world is beyond my understanding; + But when I walk I see that it consists of three or four hills + and a cloud. + + +II + + From my balcony, I survey the yellow air, + Reading where I have written, + “The spring is like a belle undressing.” + + +III + + The gold tree is blue. + The singer has pulled his cloak over his head. + The moon is in the folds of the cloak. + + + + +Anecdote of the Prince of Peacocks + + + In the moonlight + I met Berserk, + In the moonlight + On the bushy plain. + Oh, sharp he was + As the sleepless! + + And, “Why are you red + In this milky blue?” + I said. + “Why sun-colored, + As if awake + In the midst of sleep?” + + “You that wander,” + So he said, + “On the bushy plain, + Forget so soon. + But I set my traps + In the midst of dreams.” + + I knew from this + That the blue ground + Was full of blocks + And blocking steel. + I knew the dread + Of the bushy plain, + + And the beauty + Of the moonlight + Falling there, + Falling + As sleep falls + In the innocent air. + + + + +A High-Toned Old Christian Woman + + + Poetry is the supreme fiction, madame. + Take the moral law and make a nave of it + And from the nave build haunted heaven. Thus, + The conscience is converted into palms, + Like windy citherns hankering for hymns. + We agree in principle. That’s clear. But take + The opposing law and make a peristyle, + And from the peristyle project a masque + Beyond the planets. Thus, our bawdiness, + Unpurged by epitaph, indulged at last, + Is equally converted into palms, + Squiggling like saxophones. And palm for palm, + Madame, we are where we began. Allow, + Therefore, that in the planetary scene + Your disaffected flagellants, well-stuffed, + Smacking their muzzy bellies in parade, + Proud of such novelties of the sublime, + Such tink and tank and tunk-a-tunk-tunk, + May, merely may, madame, whip from themselves + A jovial hullabaloo among the spheres. + This will make widows wince. But fictive things + Wink as they will. Wink most when widows wince. + + + + +The Place of the Solitaires + + + Let the place of the solitaires + Be a place of perpetual undulation. + + Whether it be in mid-sea + On the dark, green water-wheel, + Or on the beaches, + There must be no cessation + Of motion, or of the noise of motion, + The renewal of noise + And manifold continuation; + + And, most, of the motion of thought + And its restless iteration, + + In the place of the solitaires, + Which is to be a place of perpetual undulation. + + + + +The Weeping Burgher + + + It is with a strange malice + That I distort the world. + + Ah! that ill humors + Should mask as white girls. + And ah! that Scaramouche + Should have a black barouche. + + The sorry verities! + Yet in excess, continual, + There is cure of sorrow. + + Permit that if as ghost I come + Among the people burning in me still, + I come as belle design + Of foppish line. + + And I, then, tortured for old speech, + A white of wildly woven rings; + I, weeping in a calcined heart, + My hands such sharp, imagined things. + + + + +The Curtains in the House of the Metaphysician + + + It comes about that the drifting of these curtains + Is full of long motions; as the ponderous + Deflations of distance; or as clouds + Inseparable from their afternoons; + Or the changing of light, the dropping + Of the silence, wide sleep and solitude + Of night, in which all motion + Is beyond us, as the firmament, + Up-rising and down-falling, bares + The last largeness, bold to see. + + + + +Banal Sojourn + + + Two wooden tubs of blue hydrangeas stand at the foot of the stone + steps. + The sky is a blue gum streaked with rose. The trees are black. + The grackles crack their throats of bone in the smooth air. + Moisture and heat have swollen the garden into a slum of bloom. + Pardie! Summer is like a fat beast, sleepy in mildew, + Our old bane, green and bloated, serene, who cries, + “That bliss of stars, that princox of evening heaven!” reminding of + seasons, + When radiance came running down, slim through the bareness. + And so it is one damns that green shade at the bottom of the land. + For who can care at the wigs despoiling the Satan ear? + And who does not seek the sky unfuzzed, soaring to the princox? + One has a malady, here, a malady. One feels a malady. + + + + +Depression before Spring + + + The cock crows + But no queen rises. + + The hair of my blonde + Is dazzling, + As the spittle of cows + Threading the wind. + + Ho! Ho! + + But ki-ki-ri-ki + Brings no rou-cou, + No rou-cou-cou. + + But no queen comes + In slipper green. + + + + +The Emperor of Ice-Cream + + + Call the roller of big cigars, + The muscular one, and bid him whip + In kitchen cups concupiscent curds. + Let the wenches dawdle in such dress + As they are used to wear, and let the boys + Bring flowers in last month’s newspapers. + Let be be finale of seem. + The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream. + + Take from the dresser of deal, + Lacking the three glass knobs, that sheet + On which she embroidered fantails once + And spread it so as to cover her face. + If her horny feet protrude, they come + To show how cold she is, and dumb. + Let the lamp affix its beam. + The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream. + + + + +The Cuban Doctor + + + I went to Egypt to escape + The Indian, but the Indian struck + Out of his cloud and from his sky. + + This was no worm bred in the moon, + Wriggling far down the phantom air, + And on a comfortable sofa dreamed. + + The Indian struck and disappeared. + I knew my enemy was near--I, + Drowsing in summer’s sleepiest horn. + + + + +Tea at the Palaz of Hoon + + + Not less because in purple I descended + The western day through what you called + The loneliest air, not less was I myself. + + What was the ointment sprinkled on my beard? + What were the hymns that buzzed beside my ears? + What was the sea whose tide swept through me there? + + Out of my mind the golden ointment rained, + And my ears made the blowing hymns they heard. + I was myself the compass of that sea: + + I was the world in which I walked, and what I saw + Or heard or felt came not but from myself; + And there I found myself more truly and more strange. + + + + +Exposition of the Contents of a Cab + + + Victoria Clementina, negress, + Took seven white dogs + To ride in a cab. + + Bells of the dogs chinked. + Harness of the horses shuffled + Like brazen shells. + + Oh-hé-hé! Fragrant puppets + By the green lake-pallors, + She too is flesh, + And a breech-cloth might wear, + Netted of topaz and ruby + And savage blooms; + + Thridding the squawkiest jungle + In a golden sedan, + White dogs at bay. + + What breech-cloth might you wear, + Except linen, embroidered + By elderly women? + + + + +Disillusionment of Ten O’Clock + + + The houses are haunted + By white night-gowns. + None are green, + Or purple with green rings, + Or green with yellow rings, + Or yellow with blue rings. + None of them are strange, + With socks of lace + And beaded ceintures. + People are not going + To dream of baboons and periwinkles. + Only, here and there, an old sailor, + Drunk and asleep in his boots, + Catches tigers + In red weather. + + + + +Sunday Morning + + +I + + Complacencies of the peignoir, and late + Coffee and oranges in a sunny chair, + And the green freedom of a cockatoo + Upon a rug mingle to dissipate + The holy hush of ancient sacrifice. + She dreams a little, and she feels the dark + Encroachment of that old catastrophe, + As a calm darkens among water-lights. + The pungent oranges and bright, green wings + Seem things in some procession of the dead, + Winding across wide water, without sound. + The day is like wide water, without sound, + Stilled for the passing of her dreaming feet + Over the seas, to silent Palestine, + Dominion of the blood and sepulchre. + + +II + + Why should she give her bounty to the dead? + What is divinity if it can come + Only in silent shadows and in dreams? + Shall she not find in comforts of the sun, + In pungent fruit and bright, green wings, or else + In any balm or beauty of the earth, + Things to be cherished like the thought of heaven? + Divinity must live within herself: + Passions of rain, or moods in falling snow; + Grievings in loneliness, or unsubdued + Elations when the forest blooms; gusty + Emotions on wet roads on autumn nights; + All pleasures and all pains, remembering + The bough of summer and the winter branch. + These are the measures destined for her soul. + + +III + + Jove in the clouds had his inhuman birth. + No mother suckled him, no sweet land gave + Large-mannered motions to his mythy mind. + He moved among us, as a muttering king, + Magnificent, would move among his hinds, + Until our blood, commingling, virginal, + With heaven, brought such requital to desire + The very hinds discerned it, in a star. + Shall our blood fail? Or shall it come to be + The blood of paradise? And shall the earth + Seem all of paradise that we shall know? + The sky will be much friendlier then than now, + A part of labor and a part of pain, + And next in glory to enduring love, + Not this dividing and indifferent blue. + + +IV + + She says, “I am content when wakened birds, + Before they fly, test the reality + Of misty fields, by their sweet questionings; + But when the birds are gone, and their warm fields + Return no more, where, then, is paradise?” + There is not any haunt of prophesy, + Nor any old chimera of the grave, + Neither the golden underground, nor isle + Melodious, where spirits gat them home, + Nor visionary south, nor cloudy palm + Remote on heaven’s hill, that has endured + As April’s green endures; or will endure + Like her remembrance of awakened birds, + Or her desire for June and evening, tipped + By the consummation of the swallow’s wings. + + +V + + She says, “But in contentment I still feel + The need of some imperishable bliss.” + Death is the mother of beauty; hence from her, + Alone, shall come fulfilment to our dreams + And our desires. Although she strews the leaves + Of sure obliteration on our paths, + The path sick sorrow took, the many paths + Where triumph rang its brassy phrase, or love + Whispered a little out of tenderness, + She makes the willow shiver in the sun + For maidens who were wont to sit and gaze + Upon the grass, relinquished to their feet. + She causes boys to pile new plums and pears + On disregarded plate. The maidens taste + And stray impassioned in the littering leaves. + + +VI + + Is there no change of death in paradise? + Does ripe fruit never fall? Or do the boughs + Hang always heavy in that perfect sky, + Unchanging, yet so like our perishing earth, + With rivers like our own that seek for seas + They never find, the same receding shores + That never touch with inarticulate pang? + Why set the pear upon those river-banks + Or spice the shores with odors of the plum? + Alas, that they should wear our colors there, + The silken weavings of our afternoons, + And pick the strings of our insipid lutes! + Death is the mother of beauty, mystical, + Within whose burning bosom we devise + Our earthly mothers waiting, sleeplessly. + + +VII + + Supple and turbulent, a ring of men + Shall chant in orgy on a summer morn + Their boisterous devotion to the sun, + Not as a god, but as a god might be, + Naked among them, like a savage source. + Their chant shall be a chant of paradise, + Out of their blood, returning to the sky; + And in their chant shall enter, voice by voice, + The windy lake wherein their lord delights, + The trees, like serafin, and echoing hills, + That choir among themselves long afterward. + They shall know well the heavenly fellowship + Of men that perish and of summer morn. + And whence they came and whither they shall go + The dew upon their feet shall manifest. + + +VIII + + She hears, upon that water without sound, + A voice that cries, “The tomb in Palestine + Is not the porch of spirits lingering. + It is the grave of Jesus, where he lay.” + We live in an old chaos of the sun, + Or old dependency of day and night, + Or island solitude, unsponsored, free, + Of that wide water, inescapable. + Deer walk upon our mountains, and the quail + Whistle about us their spontaneous cries; + Sweet berries ripen in the wilderness; + And, in the isolation of the sky, + At evening, casual flocks of pigeons make + Ambiguous undulations as they sink, + Downward to darkness, on extended wings. + + + + +The Virgin Carrying a Lantern + + + There are no bears among the roses, + Only a negress who supposes + Things false and wrong + + About the lantern of the beauty + Who walks, there, as a farewell duty, + Walks long and long. + + The pity that her pious egress + Should fill the vigil of a negress + With heat so strong! + + + + +Stars at Tallapoosa + + + The lines are straight and swift between the stars. + The night is not the cradle that they cry, + The criers, undulating the deep-oceaned phrase. + The lines are much too dark and much too sharp. + + The mind herein attains simplicity, + There is no moon, no single, silvered leaf. + The body is no body to be seen + But is an eye that studies its black lid. + + Let these be your delight, secretive hunter, + Wading the sea-lines, moist and ever-mingling, + Mounting the earth-lines, long and lax, lethargic. + These lines are swift and fall without diverging. + + The melon-flower nor dew nor web of either + Is like to these. But in yourself is like: + A sheaf of brilliant arrows flying straight, + Flying and falling straightway for their pleasure, + + Their pleasure that is all bright-edged and cold; + Or, if not arrows, then the nimblest motions, + Making recoveries of young nakedness + And the lost vehemence the midnights hold. + + + + +Explanation + + + Ach, Mutter, + This old, black dress, + I have been embroidering + French flowers on it. + + Not by way of romance, + Here is nothing of the ideal, + Nein, + Nein. + + It would have been different, + Liebchen, + If I had imagined myself, + In an orange gown, + Drifting through space, + Like a figure on the church-wall. + + + + +Six Significant Landscapes + + +I + + An old man sits + In the shadow of a pine tree + In China. + He sees larkspur, + Blue and white, + At the edge of the shadow, + Move in the wind. + His beard moves in the wind. + The pine tree moves in the wind. + Thus water flows + Over weeds. + + +II + + The night is of the color + Of a woman’s arm: + Night, the female, + Obscure, + Fragrant and supple, + Conceals herself. + A pool shines, + Like a bracelet + Shaken in a dance. + + +III + + I measure myself + Against a tall tree. + I find that I am much taller, + For I reach right up to the sun, + With my eye; + And I reach to the shore of the sea + With my ear. + Nevertheless, I dislike + The way the ants crawl + In and out of my shadow. + + +IV + + When my dream was near the moon, + The white folds of its gown + Filled with yellow light. + The soles of its feet + Grew red. + Its hair filled + With certain blue crystallizations + From stars, + Not far off. + + +V + + Not all the knives of the lamp-posts, + Nor the chisels of the long streets, + Nor the mallets of the domes + And high towers, + Can carve + What one star can carve, + Shining through the grape-leaves. + + +VI + + Rationalists, wearing square hats, + Think, in square rooms, + Looking at the floor, + Looking at the ceiling. + They confine themselves + To right-angled triangles. + If they tried rhomboids, + Cones, waving lines, ellipses-- + As for example, the ellipse of the half-moon-- + Rationalists would wear sombreros. + + + + +Bantams in Pine-Woods + + + Chieftain Iffucan of Azcan in caftan + Of tan with henna hackles, halt! + + Damned universal cock, as if the sun + Was blackamoor to bear your blazing tail. + + Fat! Fat! Fat! Fat! I am the personal. + Your world is you. I am my world. + + You ten-foot poet among inchlings. Fat! + Begone! An inchling bristles in these pines, + + Bristles, and points their Appalachian tangs, + And fears not portly Azcan nor his hoos. + + + + +Anecdote of the Jar + + + I placed a jar in Tennessee, + And round it was, upon a hill. + It made the slovenly wilderness + Surround that hill. + + The wilderness rose up to it, + And sprawled around, no longer wild. + The jar was round upon the ground + And tall and of a port in air. + + It took dominion everywhere. + The jar was gray and bare. + It did not give of bird or bush, + Like nothing else in Tennessee. + + + + +Palace of the Babies + + + The disbeliever walked the moonlit place, + Outside of gates of hammered serafin, + Observing the moon-blotches on the walls. + + The yellow rocked across the still façades, + Or else sat spinning on the pinnacles, + While he imagined humming sounds and sleep. + + The walker in the moonlight walked alone, + And each blank window of the building balked + His loneliness and what was in his mind: + + If in a shimmering room the babies came, + Drawn close by dreams of fledgling wing, + It was because night nursed them in its fold. + + Night nursed not him in whose dark mind + The clambering wings of birds of black revolved, + Making harsh torment of the solitude. + + The walker in the moonlight walked alone, + And in his heart his disbelief lay cold. + His broad-brimmed hat came close upon his eyes. + + + + +Frogs Eat Butterflies. Snakes Eat Frogs. Hogs Eat Snakes. Men Eat Hogs + + + It is true that the rivers went nosing like swine, + Tugging at banks, until they seemed + Bland belly-sounds in somnolent troughs, + + That the air was heavy with the breath of these swine, + The breath of turgid summer, and + Heavy with thunder’s rattapallax, + + That the man who erected this cabin, planted + This field, and tended it awhile, + Knew not the quirks of imagery, + + That the hours of his indolent, arid days, + Grotesque with this nosing in banks, + This somnolence and rattapallax, + + Seemed to suckle themselves on his arid being, + As the swine-like rivers suckled themselves + While they went seaward to the sea-mouths. + + + + +Jasmine’s Beautiful Thoughts Underneath the Willow + + + My titillations have no foot-notes + And their memorials are the phrases + Of idiosyncratic music. + + The love that will not be transported + In an old, frizzled, flambeaued manner, + But muses on its eccentricity, + + Is like a vivid apprehension + Of bliss beyond the mutes of plaster, + Or paper souvenirs of rapture, + + Of bliss submerged beneath appearance, + In an interior ocean’s rocking + Of long, capricious fugues and chorals. + + + + +Cortège for Rosenbloom + + + Now, the wry Rosenbloom is dead + And his finical carriers tread, + On a hundred legs, the tread + Of the dead. + Rosenbloom is dead. + + They carry the wizened one + Of the color of horn + To the sullen hill, + Treading a tread + In unison for the dead. + + Rosenbloom is dead. + The tread of the carriers does not halt + On the hill, but turns + Up the sky. + They are bearing his body into the sky. + + It is the infants of misanthropes + And the infants of nothingness + That tread + The wooden ascents + Of the ascending of the dead. + + It is turbans they wear + And boots of fur + As they tread the boards + In a region of frost, + Viewing the frost. + + To a chirr of gongs + And a chitter of cries + And the heavy thrum + Of the endless tread + That they tread. + + To a jangle of doom + And a jumble of words + Of the intense poem + Of the strictest prose + Of Rosenbloom. + + And they bury him there, + Body and soul, + In a place in the sky. + The lamentable tread! + Rosenbloom is dead. + + + + +Tattoo + + + The light is like a spider. + It crawls over the water. + It crawls over the edges of the snow. + It crawls under your eyelids + And spreads its webs there-- + Its two webs. + + The webs of your eyes + Are fastened + To the flesh and bones of you + As to rafters or grass. + + There are filaments of your eyes + On the surface of the water + And in the edges of the snow. + + + + +The Bird with the Coppery, Keen Claws + + + Above the forest of the parakeets, + A parakeet of parakeets prevails, + A pip of life amid a mort of tails. + + (The rudiments of tropics are around, + Aloe of ivory, pear of rusty rind.) + His lids are white because his eyes are blind. + + He is not paradise of parakeets, + Of his gold ether, golden alguazil. + Except because he broods there and is still, + + Panache upon panache, his tails deploy + Upward and outward, in green-vented forms, + His tip a drop of water full of storms. + + But though the turbulent tinges undulate + As his pure intellect applies its laws, + He moves not on his coppery, keen claws. + + He munches a dry shell while he exerts + His will, yet never ceases, perfect cock, + To flare, in the sun-pallor of his rock. + + + + +Life Is Motion + + + In Oklahoma, + Bonnie and Josie, + Dressed in calico, + Danced around a stump. + They cried, + “Ohoyaho, + Ohoo” ... + Celebrating the marriage + Of flesh and air. + + + + +Architecture + + +I + + What manner of building shall we build? + Let us design a chastel de chasteté. + De pensée.... + Never cease to deploy the structure. + Keep the laborers shouldering plinths. + Pass the whole of life earing the clink of the + Chisels of the stone-cutters cutting the stones. + + +II + + In this house, what manner of utterance shall there be? + What heavenly dithyramb + And cantilene? + What niggling forms of gargoyle patter? + Of what shall the speech be, + In that splay of marble + And of obedient pillars? + + +III + + And how shall those come vested that come there? + In their ugly reminders? + Or gaudy as tulips? + As they climb the stairs + To the group of Flora Coddling Hecuba? + As they climb the flights + To the closes + Overlooking whole seasons? + + +IV + + Let us build the building of light. + Push up the towers + To the cock-tops. + These are the pointings of our edifice, + Which, like a gorgeous palm, + Shall tuft the commonplace. + These are the window-sill + On which the quiet moonlight lies. + + +V + + How shall we hew the sun, + Split it and make blocks, + To build a ruddy palace? + How carve the violet moon + To set in nicks? + Let us fix portals, east and west, + Abhorring green-blue north and blue-green south. + Our chiefest dome a demoiselle of gold. + Pierce the interior with pouring shafts, + In diverse chambers. + Pierce, too, with buttresses of coral air + And purple timbers, + Various argentines, + Embossings of the sky. + + +VI + + And, finally, set guardians in the grounds, + Gray, gruesome grumblers. + For no one proud, nor stiff, + No solemn one, nor pale, + No chafferer, may come + To sully the begonias, nor vex + With holy or sublime ado + The kremlin of kermess. + + +VII + + Only the lusty and the plenteous + Shall walk + The bronze-filled plazas + And the nut-shell esplanades. + + + + +The Wind Shifts + + + This is how the wind shifts: + Like the thoughts of an old human, + Who still thinks eagerly + And despairingly. + The wind shifts like this: + Like a human without illusions, + Who still feels irrational things within her. + The wind shifts like this: + Like humans approaching proudly, + Like humans approaching angrily. + This is how the wind shifts: + Like a human, heavy and heavy, + Who does not care. + + + + +Colloquy with a Polish Aunt + + _Elle savait toutes les légendes du Paradis et tous les contes de + la Pologne._ _Revue des Deux Mondes_ + + + _She_ + + How is it that my saints from Voragine, + In their embroidered slippers, touch your spleen? + + + _He_ + + Old pantaloons, duenna of the spring! + + + _She_ + + Imagination is the will of things.... + Thus, on the basis of the common drudge, + You dream of women, swathed in indigo, + Holding their books toward the nearer stars, + To read, in secret, burning secrecies.... + + + + +Gubbinal + + + That strange flower, the sun, + Is just what you say. + Have it your way. + + The world is ugly, + And the people are sad. + + That tuft of jungle feathers, + That animal eye, + Is just what you say. + + That savage of fire, + That seed, + Have it your way. + + The world is ugly, + And the people are sad. + + + + +Two Figures in Dense Violet Night + + + I had as lief be embraced by the porter at the hotel + As to get no more from the moonlight + Than your moist hand. + + Be the voice of night and Florida in my ear. + Use dusky words and dusky images. + Darken your speech. + + Speak, even, as if I did not hear you speaking, + But spoke for you perfectly in my thoughts, + Conceiving words, + + As the night conceives the sea-sounds in silence, + And out of their droning sibilants makes + A serenade. + + Say, puerile, that the buzzards crouch on the ridge-pole + And sleep with one eye watching the stars fall + Below Key West. + + Say that the palms are clear in a total blue, + Are clear and are obscure; that it is night; + That the moon shines. + + + + +Theory + + + I am what is around me. + + Women understand this. + One is not duchess + A hundred yards from a carriage. + + These, then are portraits: + A black vestibule; + A high bed sheltered by curtains. + + These are merely instances. + + + + +To the One of Fictive Music + + + Sister and mother and diviner love, + And of the sisterhood of the living dead + Most near, most clear, and of the clearest bloom, + And of the fragrant mothers the most dear + And queen, and of diviner love the day + And flame and summer and sweet fire, no thread + Of cloudy silver sprinkles in your gown + Its venom of renown, and on your head + No crown is simpler than the simple hair. + + Now, of the music summoned by the birth + That separates us from the wind and sea, + Yet leaves us in them, until earth becomes, + By being so much of the things we are, + Gross effigy and simulacrum, none + Gives motion to perfection more serene + Than yours, out of our imperfections wrought, + Most rare, or ever of more kindred air + In the laborious weaving that you wear. + + For so retentive of themselves are men + That music is intensest which proclaims + The near, the clear, and vaunts the clearest bloom, + And of all vigils musing the obscure, + That apprehends the most which sees and names, + As in your name, an image that is sure, + Among the arrant spices of the sun, + O bough and bush and scented vine, in whom + We give ourselves our likest issuance. + + Yet not too like, yet not so like to be + Too near, too clear, saving a little to endow + Our feigning with the strange unlike, whence springs + The difference that heavenly pity brings. + For this, musician, in your girdle fixed + Bear other perfumes. On your pale head wear + A band entwining, set with fatal stones. + Unreal, give back to us what once you gave: + The imagination that we spurned and crave. + + + + +Hymn from a Watermelon Pavilion + + + You dweller in the dark cabin, + To whom the watermelon is always purple, + Whose garden is wind and moon, + + Of the two dreams, night and day, + What lover, what dreamer, would choose + The one obscured by sleep? + + Here is the plantain by your door + And the best cock of red feather + That crew before the clocks. + + A feme may come, leaf-green, + Whose coming may give revel + Beyond revelries of sleep, + + Yes, and the blackbird spread its tail, + So that the sun may speckle, + While it creaks hail. + + You dweller in the dark cabin, + Rise, since rising will not waken, + And hail, cry hail, cry hail. + + + + +Peter Quince at the Clavier + + +I + + Just as my fingers on these keys + Make music, so the self-same sounds + On my spirit make a music, too. + + Music is feeling, then, not sound; + And thus it is that what I feel, + Here in this room, desiring you, + + Thinking of your blue-shadowed silk, + Is music. It is like the strain + Waked in the elders by Susanna; + + Of a green evening, clear and warm, + She bathed in her still garden, while + The red-eyed elders, watching, felt + + The basses of their beings throb + In witching chords, and their thin blood + Pulse pizzicati of Hosanna. + + +II + + In the green water, clear and warm, + Susanna lay. + She searched + The touch of springs, + And found + Concealed imaginings. + She sighed, + For so much melody. + + Upon the bank, she stood + In the cool + Of spent emotions. + She felt, among the leaves, + The dew + Of old devotions. + + She walked upon the grass, + Still quavering. + The winds were like her maids, + On timid feet, + Fetching her woven scarves, + Yet wavering. + + A breath upon her hand + Muted the night. + She turned-- + A cymbal crashed, + And roaring horns. + + +III + + Soon, with a noise like tambourines, + Came her attendant Byzantines. + + They wondered why Susanna cried + Against the elders by her side; + + And as they whispered, the refrain + Was like a willow swept by rain. + + Anon, their lamps’ uplifted flame + Revealed Susanna and her shame. + + And then, the simpering Byzantines + Fled, with a noise like tambourines. + + +IV + + Beauty is momentary in the mind-- + The fitful tracing of a portal; + But in the flesh it is immortal. + + The body dies; the body’s beauty lives. + So evenings die, in their green going, + A wave, interminably flowing. + So gardens die, their meek breath scenting + The cowl of winter, done repenting. + So maidens die, to the auroral + Celebration of a maiden’s choral. + + Susanna’s music touched the bawdy strings + Of those white elders; but, escaping, + Left only Death’s ironic scraping. + Now, in its immortality, it plays + On the clear viol of her memory, + And makes a constant sacrament of praise. + + + + +Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird + + +I + + Among twenty snowy mountains, + The only moving thing + Was the eye of the black bird. + + +II + + I was of three minds, + Like a tree + In which there are three blackbirds. + + +III + + The blackbird whirled in the autumn winds. + It was a small part of the pantomime. + + +IV + + A man and a woman + Are one. + A man and a woman and a blackbird + Are one. + + +V + + I do not know which to prefer, + The beauty of inflections + Or the beauty of innuendoes, + The blackbird whistling + Or just after. + + +VI + + Icicles filled the long window + With barbaric glass. + The shadow of the blackbird + Crossed it, to and fro. + The mood + Traced in the shadow + An indecipherable cause. + + +VII + + O thin men of Haddam, + Why do you imagine golden birds? + Do you not see how the blackbird + Walks around the feet + Of the women about you? + + +VIII + + I know noble accents + And lucid, inescapable rhythms; + But I know, too, + That the blackbird is involved + In what I know. + + +IX + + When the blackbird flew out of sight, + It marked the edge + Of one of many circles. + + +X + + At the sight of blackbirds + Flying in a green light, + Even the bawds of euphony + Would cry out sharply. + + +XI + + He rode over Connecticut + In a glass coach. + Once, a fear pierced him, + In that he mistook + The shadow of his equipage + For blackbirds. + + +XII + + The river is moving. + The blackbird must be flying. + + +XIII + + It was evening all afternoon. + It was snowing + And it was going to snow. + The blackbird sat + In the cedar-limbs. + + + + +Nomad Exquisite + + + As the immense dew of Florida + Brings forth + The big-finned palm + And green vine angering for life, + + As the immense dew of Florida + Brings forth hymn and hymn + From the beholder, + Beholding all these green sides + And gold sides of green sides, + + And blessed mornings, + Meet for the eye of the young alligator, + And lightning colors + So, in me, come flinging + Forms, flames, and the flakes of flames. + + + + +Tea + + + When the elephant’s-ear in the park + Shrivelled in frost, + And the leaves on the paths + Ran like rats, + Your lamp-light fell + On shining pillows, + Of sea-shades and sky-shades, + Like umbrellas in Java. + + + + +To the Roaring Wind + + + What syllable are you seeking, + Vocalissimus, + In the distances of sleep? + Speak it. + + +THE END + + + + +Transcriber’s Notes + + + • Italics represented with _underscores_. + + • Obvious typographic errors silently corrected. + + • New original cover art included with this eBook is granted to the + public domain. + + + + +*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 78743 *** |