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, on 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.

  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,