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*** 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 ***