Harmonium 1

BORZOI POETRY FALL, 1923

THE PILGRIMAGE OF FESTUS Conrad Alken BITTER HERBS Harmonium C. A. Dawsan-Sittt THE PROPHET Kahlil Gibran Wallace Stevens With twflvt drawlitft 6j thi authtr WHIPPEROINNY Robirl Gravtt THE TEMPLE AND OTHBR POEMS Translattd from thi Chintlt hy Arthur Waley

New York Alfred ' A ' KnOpf Mcmxxiii COPYRIOll'J', 1 928, Bf ALl'RED A. KNOPF, l:SO.

Published, September, 1913

To MY WIFE

Bet 11p and pri11 ted bv the Vail-Ballou Oo., B inghamto n, N. Y. Paver f1trnis l1 ed b11 lV. F. Ethcri t1oton & Co .• New York. Bound bu H. WolU Eataio, New York.

MANOFAC'rURIOD IN Tlllll UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 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 lvfagazine of Verse, of Chicago, edited by Harriet Monroe. Contents

Earthy Anecdote 15 Invective against Swans 16 In the Carolinas 1 7 The Paltry Nude Starts on a Spring Voyage 18 The Plot against the Gi,ant 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 lfheme by Williams 34 Metaphors of a Magnifico 35 Ploughing or. Sunday 36 Cy Est Pourtraicte, Madame Ste Ursule, et Les Unze Mille Vierges 3 7 Hibiscus on the Sleeping Shores 39 Fabliau of Florida 40 The Doct.or 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 9 Frogs Eat Butterflies. Snakes Eat Frogs. Hogs Eat From the Misery of Don Joost 70 Snakes. Men Eat Hogs 114 0, Florida, Venereal Soil 71 Jasmine's Beautiful Thoughts underneath the Willow 115 Last Looks at the Lilacs 73 Cortege for Rosenbloom 116 The Warms at Heaven's Gate 74 Tattoo 118 Th'! Jack Rabbit 75 The Bird with the Coppery, Keen Claws 119 Valley Candle 76 Life is Motion 120 Anecdote of Men by the Thousand 77 Architecture 121 The Silver Plough-Boy 78 The Wind Shifts 124 The Apostrophe to Vincentine 79 Colloquy with a Polish Aunt 125 Floral Decorations for Bananas 81 Gubbinal 126 Anecdote of Canna 83 Two Figures in Dense Violet Night 127 Of the Manner of Addressing Clouds 84 Theory 128 Of Heaven Considered as a Tomb 85 To the One of Fictive Music 129 Of the Surface of Things 86 Hymn from a Watermelon Pavilion 131 Anecdote of the Prince of Peacocks 87 Peter Quince at the Clavier 132 A High-Toned Old Christian Woman 89 Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blaclcbird 135 The Place of the Solitaires 90 Nomad Exquisite 138 The Weeping Burgher 91 Tea 139 The Curtains in the House of the Metaphysician 92 To the Roaring Wind 140 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 II Palace of the Babies 113 10 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 fir'ecat.

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.

15

" Invective against Swans In the Carolinas

The soul, 0 ganders, flie s beyond the parks T he lilacs wither in the Carolinas. And fa r beyond the discords of the wind. Already the butterflies flutter above the cabins. Already the new-born children interpret love A bronze rain from the sun descending marks In the voices of mothers. The death of summer, which that time endures Timeless mother, Like one who scrawls a lis tless te tament How is it that your aspic nipples Of golden quirks and P aphian caricatures, For once vent honey?

Beque ~thing your white feathers to the moon The pine-tree sweetens my body. And giving your bland motions to the nir. The white iris beautifies me.

Behold, already on the long parades The crows anoint the statues with their dirt.

And the soul, 0 ganders, being lonely, flies Beyond your chilly chariots, to the skies.

16 17 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 Paltry Nude Starts on a Spring Voyage

B ut 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- N ot as when the goldener nude Of a later day

19 The Plot against the Giant Infanta Marina Her terrace was the sand First Girl And the palms and the twilight.

When this yokel comes maundering, She made of the motions of her wrist Whetting his hacker, The grandiose gestures I shall run before him, Of her thought. Diffusing the civilest odors Out of geraniums and unsmelled flowers. The rumpling of the plumes It will check him. Of this creature of the evening Came to be sleights of sails Second Girl Over the sea. I shall run before him, Arching cloths besprinkled with colors And thus she roamed As small as fish-eggs. In the roamings of her fan, The threads Will abash him. Partaking of the sea, And of the evening, Third Girl As they flowed around And uttered their subsiding sound. Oh, la • . . le pauvre I 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. 20 21 Turned in the loud fire, Loud as the hemlocks Full of the cry of the peacocks? Or was it a cry against the hemlocks? \ . Domination of Black Out of the window, I saw hoW. the planets gathered At night, by the fire, Like the leaves themselves The colors of the bushes Turning in the wind. And of the fallen leaves, I saw how the ni~ht came, Repeating themselves, Came striding like the color of the heavy hemlocks. Turned in the room, I felt afraid. Lik:e the leaves themselves And I remembered the cry of the peacocks. Turning in the wind. Yes: but the color of the heavy hemlock:s Came striding. And I remembered the cry of the peacock:s.

The colors of their tails vVere lik:e 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 hemlock:s 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 peacock:s

22 23 I I The Snow Man / The Ordinary Women 0 ne must have a mind of winter T hen from their pove rty they rose, To regard the frost and the boughs From dry catarrhs, and to guitars Of the pine-trees crusted with snow ; They fl itted Through the palace walls. And have been cold a long time To behold the junipers shagged with ice, They flu ng monotony behind, The spruces rough in the distant glitter Turned from their want, and, nonchalant, They crowded Of the January sun;

For the listener, who listens in the snow, And the cold dresses that they wore, And, nothing himself, beholds In the vapid haze of the window-bays, Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is. W ·ere tranquil As they leaned and looked

From the window-sills at the alphabets, At bet·a b and gamma g, To study The canting curlicues 25 /) 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 The Load of Sugar-Cane Rumbled a-day and a-day, a-day. The going of the glade-boat The moonlight Is like water flowing; Rose on the beachy floors. Like water flowing How explicit the coiffures became, Through the green saw-grass, The diamond point, the sapphire point, Under the rainbows; The sequins Of the civil fans! Under the rainbows That are like birds, Insinuations of desire, Turning, bedizened, Puissant speech, alike in each, Cried quittance While the wind still whistles To the wickless halls. As kildeer do,

Then from their poverty they rose, When they rise From dry guitars, and to catarrhs At the red turban They flitted Of the boatman. Through the palace walls.

27 26 III Is it for nothing, then, that old Chinese Sat tittivating by their mountain pools Or in the Yangste studied out their beards? Le Monocle de Mon Oncle I shall not play the flat historic scale. You know how Utamaro's beauties sought I The end of love in their all-speaking braids. You know the mountainous coiffures of Bath. "Mother of heaven, regina of the clouds, Alas I Have all the barbers lived in vain 0 sceptre of the sun, crown of the moon, That not one curl in nature has survived? There is not nothing, no·, no, never nothing, Why, without pity on these studious ghosts, Like the clashed edges of two words that kill." Do you come dripping in your hair from sleep? 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. IV The sea of spuming thought foists up again This luscious and impeccable fruit of life The radiant bubble that she was. And then Falls, it appears, of its own weight to earth. A deep up-pouring from some saltier well W:hen you were Eve, its acrid juice was sweet, Within me, bursts its watery syllable. Untasted, in its heavenly, orchard air. An apple serves as well as any skull II To be the book in which to read a round, And is as excellent, in that it is composed A red bird flies across the golden floor. Of what, like skulls, comes rotting back to ground. It is a red bird that seeks out his choir But it excels in this, that as the fruit Among the choirs of wind and wet and wing. Of love, it is a book too mad to read A torrent will fall from him when he finds. Before one merely reads to pass the time. 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. v These choirs of welcome choir for me farewell. In the high west there burns a furious star. No spring can follow past meridian. It is for fiery boys that star was set Yet you persist with anecdotal bliss And for sweet-smelling virgins close to them. To make believe a starry connaissance. The measure of the intensity of love 28 29 Suppose these couriers brought amid their train Is measure, also, of the verve of earth. A damsel heightened by eternal bloom. For me, the firefly's quick, electric stroke Ticks tediously the time of one more year. VIII And you? Remember how the crickets came II• Out of their mother grass, like little kin, Like a dull scholar, I behold, in love, 'rn the pale nights, when your first imagery An ancient aspect touching a new mind. Found inklings of your bond to all that dust. 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. VI Two golden gourds distended on our vines, If men at forty will be painting lakes We hang like warty squashes, streaked and rayed, The ephemeral blues must merge for them in one, Into the autumn weather, splashed with frost, The basic slate, the universal hue. Distorted by hale fatness, turned grotesque. There is a substance in us that prevails. The laughing sky will see the two of us But in our amours amorists discern Washed into rinds by rotting winter rains. Such fluctuations that their scrivening Is breathless to attend each quirky turn. IX When amorists grow bald, then amours shrink I11 verses wild with motion, full of din, Into the compass and curriculum Loudened by cries, by clashes, quick and sure Of introspective exiles, lecturing. As the deadly thought of men accomplishing It is a theme for Hyacinth alone. Their curious fates in war, come, celebrate The faith of forty, ward of Cupido. VII Most venerable heart, the lustiest conceit Is not too lusty for your broadening. The mules that angels ride come slowly down I quiz all sounds, all though ts, all everything The blazing passes, from beyond the sun. For the music and manner of the paladins Descensions of their tinkling bells arrive. To make oblation fit . Where shall I find These muleteers are dainty of their way. Bravura adequate to this great hymn? Meantime, centurions guffaw and beat Th ~ ir shrilling tankards on the table-boards. x This parable, in sense, amounts to this: The honey of heaven may or may not come, The fops of fancy in their poems leave But that of earth both comes and goes at once. Memorabilia of the mystic spouts, 30 31 Like a rose rabbi, later, I pursued, Spontaneously watering their gritty soils. And still pursue, the origin and course I am a yeoman, as such fellows go. Of love, but until now I never knew I know no magic trees, no balmy boughs, That fluttering things have so distinct a shade. 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 tip 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 ti.red 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 m my mincing world. 33 32 Metaphors of a Magnifico Nuances of a Theme by Williams Twenty men crossing a bridge, [ t' s a strange courage Into a village, you give me, ancient star: Are twenty men crossing twenty bridges, Into twenty villages, Shine alone in the sunrise Or one man toward which you lend no part I Crossing a single bridge into a village.

This is old song I That will not declare itself Shine alone, shine nakedly, shine like bronze, Twenty men crossing a bridge, that reflects neither my face nor any inner part Into a village, of my being, shine like fire, that mirrors nothing. Are T wenty men crossing a bridge II Into a village.

Lend no part to any humanity that suffuses That will not declare itself you in its own light. Yet is certain as meaning . . Be not chimera of morning, Half-man, half-star. The boots of the men clump Be not an intelligence, On the boards of the bridge. Like a widow's bird The first white wall of the village Or an old horse. 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. . 34 35 Ploughing on Sunday Cy Est Pourtraicte, Madame Ste The white cock's tail Ursule, et Les Unze Mille Tosses in the wind. Vierges The turkey-cock's tail U rsula, in a garden, found Glitters in the sun. A bed of radishes. She kneeled upon the ground Water in the fields. And gathered them, The wind pours down. With flowers around, The feathers flare Blue, gold, pink, 1and green. And bluster in the wind. She dressed in red and gold brocade Remus, blow your horn! And in the grass an offering made I 'm ploughing on Sunday, Of radishes and flowers. Ploughing North America. Blow your horn! She said, "My dear, Upon your altars, Tum-ti-tum, I have placed Ti-tum-tum-tum! The marguerite and coquelicot, The turkey-cock's tail And roses Spreads to the sun. Frail as April snow; But here,'' she sai d, The white cock's tail "Where none can see, Streams to the moon. I make an offering, in the grass, Water in the fields. Of radishes and flowers." The wind pou rs down. And then she wept For fear the Lord would not accept. 37 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, Hibiscus on the Sleeping Shores Or pity. I say now, Fernando, that on that day The mind roamed as a moth roams, This is not writ Among the blooms beyon

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 cafe- And roamed there all the stupid afternoon.

39 F abliau of Florida The Doctor of Geneva Barque of phosphor T he doctor of Geneva st-amped the sand On the palmy beach, That lay impounding the Pacific swell, Patted his stove-pipe hat and tugged his shawl. Move outward into heaven, Into the alabasters Lacustrine man had never been assailed And night blues. By such long-rolling opulent cataracts, Unless Racine or Bossuet held the like. Foam and cloud are one. Sultry moon-monsters He did not quail. A man so used to plumb Are dissolving. The multifarious heavens felt no awe Before these visible, voluble delugings, Fill your black hull With white moonlight. Which yet found means to set his simmering mind Spinning and hissing with oracular There will never be an end Notations of the wild, the ruinous waste, To this droning of the surf. Until the steeples of his city clanked and sprang In an unburgherly apocalypse. The doctor used his handkerchief and sighed.

41 Another Weeping Woman Homunculus et La Belle Pour the unhappiness out Etoile From your too bitter heart, I n the sea, Biscayne, there prinks Which grieving will not sweeten. The young emerald, evening star, Good light for drunkards, poets, widows, Poison grows in this dark. And ladies soon to be married. It is in the water of tears Its black blooms rise. By this light the salty fishes Arch in the sea like tree-branches, The magnificent cause of being, Going in many directions The imagination, the one reality Up and down. In this imagined world This light conducts Leaves you The thoughts of drunkards, the feelings With him for whom no phantasy moves, Of widows and trembling ladies, And you are pierced by a death. 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 I 43 42 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 The Comedian As the Letter C That know the ultimate Plato, Tranquillizing with this jewel The torments of confusion.

44 I The World without Imagination N ota: 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 pate, 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 47 Of China, cap of Spain, imperative haw Dejected his manner to the turbulence. Of hum, inquisitorial botanist, The salt hung on his spirit like a frost, And general lexicographer of mute The dead brine melted in him like a dew And maidenly greenhorns, no w beheld himself, Of winter, until nothing of himself A skinny sailor peering in the sea-glass. Remained, except some starker, barer self What word split up in dickering syllables In a starker, barer world, in which the sun And storming under multitudinous tones Was not the sun because it never shone W.as name for this short-shanks in all that brunt? With bland complaisance on pale parasols, Crispin was washed away by magnitude. Beetled, in chapels, on the chaste bouquets. The whole of life that still remained in him Against his pipping sounds a trumpet cried Dwindled to one sound strumming in his ear, Celestial sneering boisterously. Crispin Ubiquitous concussion, slap and sigh, Became an introspective voyager. Polyphony beyond his baton's thrust. Here was the veritable ding an sich, at last, Could Crispin stem verboseness in the sea, Crispin confronting it, a vocable thing, The old iage of a watery realist, But with a speech belched out of hoary darks Triton, dissolved in shifting diaphanes Noway resembling his, a visible thing, Of blue and green? A wordy, watery age And excepting negligible Triton, free That whispered to the sun's compassion, made From the unavoidable shadow of himself A convocation, nightly, of the sea-stars, That lay elsewhere around him. Severance And on the clopping foot-ways of the moon Was clear. The last distortion of romance Lay grovelling. Triton incomplicate with that Forsook the insatiable egotist. The sea Which made him Triton, nothing left of him, Severs not only lands but also selves. Except in faint, memorial gesturings, Here was no help before reality. That were like 'arms and shoulders in the waves, Crispin beheld and Crispin was made new. Here, something in the rise and fall of wind The imagination, here, could not evade, That seemed hallucinating horn, and here, In poems of plums, the strict au terity A sunken voice, both of remembering Of one vast, subj ugating, :final tone. And of forgetfulness, in alternate strain. The drenching of stale lives no more fell down. Just so an ancient Crispin was dissolved. What was this gaudy, gusty panoply? The valet in the tempest was annulled. Out of what swift destruction did it spring? Bordeaux to Yucatan, Havana next, It was caparison of wind and cloud And then to Carolina. Simple jaunt. And something given to make whole among Crispin, merest minuscule in the gales, The ruses that were shattered by the large. 48 49 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. II His violence was for aggrandizement Concerning the Thunderstorms of And not for stupor, such as music makes For sleepers halfway waking. He perceived Yucatan That coolness for his heat came suddenly, In Yucatan, the Maya sonneteers And only, in the fables that he scrawled Of the Caribbean amphitheatre, With his own quill, in its indigenous dew, In spite of hawk and falcon, green toucan Of an aesthetic tough, diverse, untamed, And jay, still to the night-bird made their plea, Incredible to prudes, the mint of dirt, As if raspberry tanagers in palms, Green barbarism turning paradigm. High up in orange air, were barbarous. Crispin foresaw a curious promenade But Crispin was too destitute to find Or, nobler, sensed an elemental fate, In any commonplace the sought-for aid. And elemental potencies and pangs, He was a man made vivid by the sea, And beautiful barenesses as yet unseen, A man come out of luminous traversing, Making the most of savagery of palms, Much trumpeted, made desperately clear, Of moonlight on the thick, cadaverous bloom Fresh from discoveries of tidal skies, That yuccas breed, and of the panther's tread. To whom oracular rockings gave no rest. The fabulous and its intrinsic verse Into a savage color he went on. Came like two spirits parleying, adorned In radiance from the Atlantic coign, How greatly had he grown in his demesne, For Crispin and his quill to catechize. This auditor of insects! He that saw But they came parleying of such an earth, The stride of vanishing autumn in a park So thick with sides and jagged lops of green, By way of decorous melancholy; he So in tertwined with serpent-kin encoiled That wrote his couplet yearly to the spring, Among the purple tufts, the scarlet crowns, As dissertation of profound delight, Scenting the jungle in thei,r refuges, Stopping, on voyage, in a land of snakes, So streaked with yellow, blue and green and red Found his vicissitudes had much enlarged In beak an d bud and fruity gobbet- kins, His apprehension, made him intricate That earth was like a jostling festival 50 Of seeds grown fat, too juicily opulent, Expandi ng in the gold's matem(ll warmth. 5l And studious of a self possessing him, So much for that. The affectionate emigrant found That was not in him in the crusty town A new reality in parrot-squawks. From which he sailed. Beyond him, westward, lay Yet let that trifle pass. Now, as this odd The mountainous ridges, purple balustrades, Discoverer walked through the harbor streets In which the thunder, lapsing in i.ts clap, Inspecting the cabildo, the fa;ade Let down gigantic quave rs of its voice, Of the cathedral, making notes, he heard For Crispin to vociferate again. A rumbling, west of Mexico, it seemed, Approaching like a gasconade of drums. The white cabildo darkened, the fa~ade, 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, Carne 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 wias free And more than free, elate, intent, profound 53 52 The green palmettoes in crepuscular ice Clipped frigidly blue-black meridians, Morose chiaroscuro, gauntly drawn.

How many poems he denied himself III In his observant progress, lesser things Than the relentle s contact he desired; Approaching Carolina How many sea-masks he ignored; what sounds The book of moonlight is not wrLtten yet He shut out from his tempering ear; what thoughts, Nor half begun, but, when it is, leave room Like jades affecting the sequestered bride; For Crispin, fagot in the lunar fire, And what descants, he sent to banishment! Who, in the hubbub of his pilgrimage Perhaps the Arctic moonlight really gave Through sweating changes, never could forget The liaison, the blissful liaison, That wakefulness or meditating sleep, Between himself and his environment, In which the sulky strophes willingly Which was, and is, chief moti,ve, first delight, Bore up, in time, the somnolent, deep songs. For him, and not for him alone. It seemed Leave room, therefore, in that unwritten book Illusive, faint, more mist than moon, perverse, For the legendary moonlight that once burned Wrong as a divagation to Peking, In Crispin's mind above a continent. To him that postulated as his theme America was always north to him, The vulgar, as his theme and hymn and flight, A northern west or western north, but north, A passionately niggling nightingale. And thereby polar, polar-purple, chilled Moonlight was an evasion, or, if not, And lank, rising and slumping from a sea A minor meeting, facile, delicate. Of hardy foam, receding flatly, spread Thus he conceived his voyaging to be In endless ledges, glittering, submerged An up and down between two elements, And cold in a boreal mistiness of the moon. A fluctuating between sun and moon, The spring came there in clinking pannicles A sally into gold and crimson forms, Of half-dissolving frost, the summer came, As on this voyage, out of goblinry, If ever, whisked and wet, not ripening, And then retirement like a turning back Before the winter's vacancy returned. And sinking down to the indulgences The myrtle, if the myrtle ever bloomed, That in the moonlight have their habitude. Was like a glacial pink upon the air. But let these backward lapses, if they would, 54 Grind their seductions on him, Crispin knew 55 It was a flourishing tropic he required He gripped more closely the essential prose For his refreshment, an abundant zone, As being, in a world so falsified, Prickly and obdurate, dense, harmonious The one integrity for him, the one Yet with a harmony not rarefied Discovery still possible to make, Nor fined for the inhibited instruments To which all poems were incident, unless Of over-civil stops. And thus he tossed That prose should wear a poem's guise at last. 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. 57 56 I

I 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. IV He made a singular collation. Thus: The natives of the rain are rainy men. The Idea of a Colony Although they paint effulgent, azure lak:es, N ota: his soil is man's intelligence. And April hillsides wooded white and pink, That's better. That's worth crossing seas to find. Their azure has a cloudy edge, their white Crispin in one laconic phrase laid bare And pink, the water bright that dogwood bears. His cloudy drift and planned a colony. And in their music showering sounds intone. Exit the mental moonlight, exit lex, On what strange froth does the gross Indian dote, Rex and principium, -exit the whole What Eden sapling gum, what honeyed gore, Shebang. Exeunt omnes. Here was prose What pulpy dram distilled of innocence, More exquisite than any tumbling verse: That streaking gold should speak in him A still new continent in which to dwell. Or bask within his images and words? What was the purpose of his pilgrimage, If these rude instances impeach themselves Whatever shape it took in Crispin's mind, By force of rudeness, let the principle If not, when all is said, to drive away Be plain. For application Crispin strove, The shadow of his fellows from the skies Abhorring Turk as Esquimau, the lute And, from their stale intelligence released, As the marimba, the magnolia as rose. To mak:e a new intelligence prevail? Hence the reverberations in the words Upon these premises propounding, he Of his first central hymns, the celebrants Projected a colony that should extend Of rankest trivia, tests of the strength To the dusk of a whistling south below the south, Of his aesthetic, his philosophy, A comprehensive island hemisphere. The more invidious, the more desired. The man in Georgia wak:ing among pines The flo·rist asking aid from cabbages, Should be pine-spokesman. The responsive man, The rich man going bare, the paladin Planting his pristine cores in Florida, Afraid, the blind man as astronomer Should prick: thereof, not on the psaltery, The appointed power unwielded fro~ disdain. But on the banjo's categorical gut, 5'8 59 Tuck tuck, while the flamingos flapped his bays. Preferring text to gloss, he humbly served Sepulchral senors, bibbing pale mescal, Grotesque apprenticeship to chance event, Oblivious to the Aztec almanacs, A clown, perhaps, but an aspiring clown. Should make the intricate Sierra scan. There is a monotonous babbling in our dreams And dark Brazilians in their cafes, That makes them our dependent heirs, the heirs Musing immaculate, pampean dits, Of dreamers buried in our sleep, and not Should scrawl a vigilant anthology, The oncoming fantasies of better birth. To be thei:r latest, lucent paramour. The apprentice knew these dreamers. If he dreamed These are the broadest instances. Crispin, Their dreams, he did it in a gingerly way. Progenitor of such extensive scope, All dreams are vexing. Let them be expunged. Was not indifferent to smart detail. But let the rabbit run, the cock declaim. The melon should have apposite ritual, Performed in verd apparel, and the peach, Trinket pasticcio, flaunting skyey sheets, When its black branches came to bud, belle day, With Crispin as the tiptoe cozener? Should have an incantation. And again, No, no: veracious page on page, exact. 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 prodi·gal, however proud, Contained in their afflatus the reproach That first drove Crispin to his wandering. He could not be content with counterfeit, With nwsquerade 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. Svch trash Might help the blind, not him, serenely sly. It irked beyond his patience. Hence it was, 60 61 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, v Harlequined and mazily dewed and mauved In bloom. Yet it survives in its own form, A Nice Shady Home Beyond these changes, good, fat, guzzly fruit. So Crispin hasped on the surviving form, Crispin as hermit, pure and capable, For him, of shall or ought to be in is. Dwelt in the land. Perhaps if discontent Had kept him still the pricking realist, Was he to bray this in profoundest brass Choosing his element from droll confect Arointing his dreams with fugal requiems? Of was and is and shall or ought to be, Was he to company vastest things defunct Beyond Bordeaux, beyond Havana, far With a blubber of tom-toms harrowing the sky? Beyond carked Yucatan, he might have come Scrawl a tragedian's testament? Prolong To colonize his polar planterdom His active force in an inactive dirge, And jig his chits upon a cloudy knee. Which, let the tall musicians call and call, But his empri:ze to that idea soon sped. Should merely call him dead? Pronounce amen Crispin dwelt in the land and dwelling there Through choirs infolded to the outmost clouds? Slid from his continent by slow recess Because he built a cabin who once planned To things within his actual eye, alert Loquacious columns by the ructive sea? To the difficulty of rebellious thought Because he turned to salad-beds again? When the sky is blue. The blue infected will. Jovial Crispin, in calamitous crape? It may be that the yarrow in his fields Should he lay by the personal and make Sealed pensive purple under its concern. Of his own fate an instance of all fate? But day by day, now this thing and now that What is one man among so many men? Confined him, while it cosseted, condoned, What are so many men in such a world? Little by little, as if the suzerain soil Can one man think one thing and think it long? Abashed him by carouse to humble yet Can one man be one thing and be it long? Attach. It seemed haphazard denouement. The very man despising honest quilts He first, as realist, admitted that Lies quilted to his poll in his despite. Whoever hunts a matinal continent For realists, what is is what should be. 62 63 And so it came, his cabin shuffied up, While he poured out upon the lips of her His trees were planted, his duenna Brought That lay beside him, the quotidian Her prismy blonde and clapped her in his hands, Like this, saps like the sun, true fortuner. The curtains flittered and the door was closed. For all it takes it gives a humped return Crispin, magister of a single room, Exchequering from piebald fiscs unkeyed. 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 d'ay, 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 theiT 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, 64 65

I 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 VI Of spiced and weathery rouges, should complex And Daughters with Curls The stopper to indulgent fatalist Was unforeseen. First Crispin smiled upon Portentous enunciation, syllable His goldenest demoiselle, inhabitant, To blessed syllable affined, and sound She seemed, of a country of the capuchins, Bubbling felicity in cantilene, So delicately blushed, so humbly eyed, Prolific and tormenting tenderness Attentive to a coronal of things Of music, as it comes to unison, Secret and singular. Second, upon Forgather and bell boldly Crispin's last A second similar counterpart, a maid Deduction. Thrum with a proud douceur Most sisterly to the first, not yet awake His grand pronunciamento and devise. Excepting to the motherly footstep, but Marvelling sometimes at the shaken sleep. ' The chits came for his jigging, bluet-eyed, Then third, a thing still flaxen in the light, Hands without touch yet touching poignantly, A creeper under jaunty leaves. And fourth, Leaving no room upon his cloudy knee, Mere Musteriness that gewgaws jollified, Prophetic joint, for its diviner young. All din and gobble, blasphemously pink. The return to social nature, once begun, A few years more and the vermeil capuchin Anabasis or slump, ascent or chute, !Gave to the cabin, lordlier than it was, Involved him in midwifery so dense The dulcet omen fit for such a house. His cabin counted as philactary, The second sister dallying was shy Then place of vexing palankeens, then haunt To fetch the one full-pinioned one himself Of children nibbling at the sugared void, Out of her botches, hot embosomer. Infants yet eminently old, then dome The third one gaping at the orioles And halidom for the unbraided femes, Lettered herself demurely as became Green crammers of the green fruits of the world, A pearly poetess, peaked for rhapsody. Bidders and hiders for its ecstasies, The fourth, pent now, a digit curious. True daughters both of Crispin and his clay. Four daughters in a world too intricate 66 In the beginning, four blithe instruments Of differing struts, four voices several 67 By apparition, pla~n and common things, In couch, four more personre, intimate Sequestering the fluster from the year, As buffo, yet divers, four mirrors blue Making gulped potions from obstreperous drops, That should be silver, four accustomed seeds And so distorting, proving what he proves Hinting incredible hues, four self-same lights Is nothing, what can all this matter since That spread chromatics in hilarious dark, The relation comes, benignly, to its end? Four questioners and four sure answerers. So may the relation of each man be clipped. 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 69 68' From the Misery of Don Joost 0, Florida, Venereal Soil I have finished my combat with the sun; And my body, the old animal, A few things for themselves, Knows nothing more. Convolvulus and coral, Buzzards and live-moss, The powerful seasons bred and killed, Tiestas from the keys, And were themselves the genii A few things for themselves, Of their own ends. Florida, venereal soil, Disclose to the lover. Oh, but the very self of the storm Of sun and slaves, breeding and death, The dreadful sundry of this world, The old animal, The Cuban, Polodowsky, The Mexican women, The senses and feeling, the very sound The negro undertaker And sight, and all there was of the storm, Killing the time between corpses Knows nothing more. 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, 70 A scholar of darkness, 71 Sequestered over the sea, Wearing a clear tiara Of red and blue and red, Sparkling, solitary, still, In the high sea-shadow. Last Looks at the Lilacs Donna, donna, dark, Stooping in indigo gown T o what good, in the alleys of the lilacs, And cloudy constellations, 0 caliper, do you scratch your buttocks Conceal yourself or disclose And tell the divine ingenue, your companion, Fewest things to the lover- That this bloom is the bloom of soap A hand that bears a thick-leaved fruit, And this fragrance the fragrance of vegetal? A pungent bloom against your shade. 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 Florea!

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.

72 73 The ] ack-Rabbit The Worms at Heaven's Gate In the morning, Q ut of the tomb, we bring Badroulbadour, The jack-rabbit sang to the Arkansaw. Within our bellies, we her chariot. He carolled in caracoles Here is an eye. And here are, one by one, On the feat sandbars. The lashes of that eye and its white lid. Here is the cheek on which that lid declined, The black man said, And, finger after finger, here, the hand, "Now, grandmother, The genius of that cheek. Here are the lips, Crochet me this buzzard The bundle of the body and the feet. On your winding-sheet, And do not forget his wry neck Out of the tomb we bring Badroulbadour. After the winter."

The black man said, "Look out, 0 caroller, The entrails of the buzzard Are rattling."

75 74 Valley Candle Anecdote of Men by the Thousand My candle burned alone in an immense valley. The soul, he said, is composed Beams of the huge night converged upon it, Of the external world. Until the wind blew. Then beams of the huge night There are men of the East, he said, Converged upon its image, Who are the East. Until the wind blew. 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. 77 The Apostrophe to Vincentine The Silver Plough-Boy I A black figure dances in a black field. It seizes a sheet, from the ground, from a bush, as if spread I figured you as nude between there by some wash-woman for the night. Monotonous earth and dark blue sky. It wraps the sheet around its body, until the black figure It made you seem so small and lean is silver. And nameless, It dances down a furrow, in the early light, back of a crazy Heavenly Vincentine. plough, the green blades following. How soon the silver fades in the dust! How soon the black II figure slips from the wrinkled sheet! How softly the sheet falls to the ground ! I saw you then, as warm as flesh, Brunette, 0 But yet not too brunette, As warm, as clean. Your dress was green, ;was whited green, // Green Vincentine.

I . .. III Then you came walking, In a group Of human others, Voluble. Yes: you came walking, Vincentine. Yes: you came talking. 79 IV And what I knew you felt Came then. Monotonous earth I saw become Illimitable spheres of you, And that white animal, so lean, Floral Decorations for Bananas Turned Vincentine, Well, nuncle, this plainly won't do. Turned heavenly Vincentine, These insolent, linear peels And that white animal, so lean, And sullen, hurricane shapes Turned heavenly, heavenly Vincentine. Won't do with your eglantine. They requi•re something serpentine. Blunt yellow in such a room I

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 I

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, 81 80 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 Of Heaven Considered as a Tomb What word have you, interpreters, of men Gloomy grammarians in golden gowns, Who in the tomb of heaven walk by night, Meekly you keep the mortal rendezvous The darkened ghosts of our old comedy? Eliciting the still sustaining pomps ' 1 Do they believe they range the gusty cold, Of speech which are like music so profound With lanterns borne aloft to light the way, They seem an exaltation without sound. Funest philosophers and ponderers, Freemen of death, about and still about To find whatever it is they seek? Or does Their evocations are the speech of clouds. That burial, pillared up each day as porte So speech of your processionals returns And spiritous passage into nothingness, In the casual evocations of your tread Foretell each night the one abysmal night, Across the stale, mysterious seasons. These When the host shall no more wander, nor the light Are the music of meet resignation; these The responsive) still sustaining pomps for you Of the steadfast lanterns creep across the dark? To magnify, i°f in that drifting waste Make hue among the dark comedians, You are to be accompanied by more Halloo them in the topmost distances Than mute bare splendors of the sun and moon. For answer from their icy Elysee. Of the Surface of Things Anecdote of the Prince of Peacocks I In the moonlight J n my room, the world is beyond my understanding; I met Berserk, But when I walk I see that it consists of three or four hills In the moonlight and a cloud. On the !YUshy plain. Oh, sharp he was As the sleepless! II And, "Why are you red From my balcony, I survey the yellow air, In this milky blue?" Reading where I have written, I said. "The spring is like a belle undressing." "Why sun-colored, As if awake III In the midst of sleep?"

The gold tree is blue. "You that wander," The singer has pulled his cloak over his head. So he said, The moon is in the folds of the cloak. "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 rhe dread 86 Of the bushy plain, 87 f I I

And the beauty Of the moonlight Falling there, Falling As sleep falls In the innocent air. A High-Toned O'ld Christian Woman \ P oetry 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 W .ink: as they will. Wink: most when widows wince.

88 89 ) I The Weeping Burgher The Place of the Solitaires / I t is with a strange malice L et the place of the solitaires That I distort the world. Be a place of perpetual undulation. I Ah! that ill humors Whether it be in mid-sea Should mask as white girls. On the dark, green water-wheel ' And ah! that Scaramouche Or on the beaches, Should have a black barouche. There must be no cessation Of motion, or of the noise of motion The sorry verities! The renewal of noise ' Yet in excess, continual, And manifold continuation; There is cure of sorrow.

And, most, of the motion of thought Permit that ~f as ghost I come And its restless iteration, Among the people burning in me still, I come as belle design In the place of the solitaires, Of foppish line. Which is to be a place of perpetual undulation. 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.

91 90 ..

The Curtains in the House Banal Sojourn of the Metaphysician Two wooden tubs of blue hydrangeas stand at the foot of the It comes about that the drifring of these curtains stone steps. Is full of long motions; as the ponderous The sky is a blue gum streaked with rose. The trees are Deflations of distance; or as clouds black. Inseparable from their afternoons; The grackles crack their throats of bone in the smooth air. Or the changing of light, the dropping Moisture and heat have swollen the garden into a slum of Of the silence, wide sleep and solitude bloom. Of night, in which all motion Pardie I Summer is like a fat beast, sleepy in mildew, Is beyond us, as the firmament, Our old bane, green and bloated, serene, who cries, Up-rising and down-falling, bares "That bliss of stars, that princox of evening heaven I" remind­ The last largeness, bold to see. ing 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.

92 93 The Emperor of Ice-Cream Depression before Spring C all the roller of hig cigars, The cock crows The muscular one, and bid him whip· But no queen rises. In kitchen cups concupiscent curds. Let the wenches dawdle in such dress The hair of my blonde As they are used to wear, and let the boys Is dazzling, Bring flowers in last month's newspapers. As the spittle of cows Let be be finale of seem. Threading the wind. The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.

Ho! Ho! Take from the dresser of deal, Lacking the three glass knobs, that sheet But ki-ki-ri-ki On which she embroidered fantails once Brings no rou-cou, And spread it so as to cover her face. No rou-cou-cou. If her horny feet protrude, they come To show how cold she is, and dumb. But no queen comes Let the lamp affix its beam. In slipper green. The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.

95 94 The Cuban Doctor Tea at the Palaz of Hoon I went to Egypt to escape Not less because in purple I descended The Indian, but the Indian struck The western day through what you called Out of his cloud and from his sky. The loneliest air, not less was I myself.

This was no worm hed in the moon, What was the ointment sprinkled on my beard? Wriggling far down the phantom air, What were the hymns that buzzed beside my ears? And on a comfortable sofa dreamed. What was the sea whose tide swept through me there?

The Indian struck and disappeared. Out of my mind the golden ointment rained, I knew my enemy was near-I, And my ears made the blowing hymns they heard. Drowsing in summer's sleepiest horn. 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.

( 96 97 Exposition of the Contents of a Cab Disillusionment of Ten O'Clock Victoria Clementina, negress, Took seven white dogs The houses are haunted By white night-gowns. To ride in a cab. None are green, Or purple with green rings, Bells of the dogs chinked. Or green with yellow nngs, Harness of the ·horses shuffled Or yellow with blue rings. Like brazen shells. None of them are strange, Oh-he-he! Fragrant puppets With socks of lace By the green lake-pallors, And beaded ceintures. She too is flesh, People are not going To dream of baboons and periwinkles. And a breech-cloth might wear, Only, here and there, an old sailor, Netted of topaz and ruby And savage blooms; Drunk and asleep in his boots, Catches tigers Thridding the squawkiest jungle In red weather. In a golden sedan, White dogs at bay.

What breech-cloth might you wear, Except linen, embroidered By elderly women?

98 99 Things to be cherished like the thO'Ught 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; Sunday Morning All pleasures and all pains, remembering I The bough of summer and the winter branch. These are the measures destined for her soul. Complacencies of the peignoir, and late Coffee and oranges in a sunny chair, III And the green freedom of a cockatoo Upon a rug mingle to dissipate Jave in the clouds had his inhuman birth. The holy hush of ancient sacri,fice. No mother suckled him, no sweet land gave She dreams a little, and she feels the dark Large-mannered inotions to his mythy mind. Encroachment of that old catastrophe, He moved among us, as a muttering king, As a calm darkens among water-lights. Magnificent, would move among his hinds, The pungent oranges and bright, green wings Until our blood, commingling, virginal, Seem things in some procession of the dead, With heaven, brought such requital to desire Winding across wide water, without sound. The very hinds discerned it, in a star. The day is like wide water, without sound, Shall our blood fail? Or shall it come to be Stilled for the passing of her dreaming feet The blood of paradise? And shall the earth Over t!he seas, to silent Palestine, Seem all of paradise that we shall know? Dominion of the blood and sepulchre. 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, II Not this dividing and indifferent blue. Why should she give her bounty to the dead? What is divinity if it can come IV Only in silent shadows and in dreams? She says, "I am content when wakened birds, Shall she not find in comforts of the sun, Before they fly, test the reality In pungent fruit and bright, green wings, or else Of misty fields, by their sweet questionings; In any balm or beauty of the earth, But when the birds are gone, and their warm fields 100 IOI Return no more, where, then, is paradise?" Unchanging, yet so like our perishing earth, There is not any haunt of prophesy, With rivers like our own that seek for seas Nor any old chimera of the grave, They never find, the same receding shores Neither the golden underground, nor isle That never touch with inarticulate pang? Melodious, where spirits gat them home, Why set the pear upon those river-banks Nor visionary south, nor cloudy palm Or spice the shores with odors of the plum? Remote on heaven's hill, that has endured Alas, that they should wear our colors there, As April's green endures; or will endure The silken weavings of our afternoons, Like her remembrance of awakened birds, And pick the strings of our insipid lutes! Or her desire for June and evening, tipped Death is the mother of beauty, mystical, By the consummation of the swallow's wings. Within whose burning bosom we devise v Our earthly mothers waiting, sleeplessly. She says, "But in contentment I still feel VII The need of some imperishable bliss." Supple and turbulent, a ring of men Death is the mother of beauty; hence from her, Shall chant in orgy on a summer morn Alone, shall come fulfilment to our dreams Their boisterous devotion to the sun, And our desires. Although she strews the leaves Not as a god, but as a god might be, Of sure obliteration on our paths, Naked among them, like a savage source. The path sick sorrow took, the many paths Their chant shall be a chant of paradise, Where triumph rang its brassy phrase, or love Out of their blood, returning to the sky; Whispered a little out of tenderness, And in their chant shall enter, voice by voice, She makes the willow shiver in the sun The windy lake wherein their lord delights, For maidens who were wont to sit and gaze The trees, like serafin, and echoing hills, Upon the grass, relinquished to their feet. That choir among themselves long afterward. She causes boys to pile new plums and pears They shall know well the heavenly fellowship On disregarded plate. The maidens taste Of men that perish and of summer morn. And stray impassioned in the littering leaves. And whence they came and whither they shall go The dew upon their feet shall manifest. VI Is there no change of death in paradise ? VIII Does ripe fruit never fall? Or do the boughs She hears, upon that water without sou~d, Hang always heavy in that perfect sky, A voice that cries, "The tomb in Palestine 102 103 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. The Virgin Carrying a Lantern Deer walk upon our mountains, and the quail Whistle about us their spontaneous cries; There are no bears among the roses, Sweet berries ripen in the wilderness; Only a negress who supposes And, in the isolation of the sky, Things false and wrong At evening, casual flocks of pigeons make Ambiguous undulations as they sink, About the lantern of the beauty Downward to darkness, on extended wings. 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!

104 105 Stars at Tallapoosa Explanation A ch, Mutter, The lines are straight and swift between the stars. This old, black dress, The night is not the cradle that they cry, I have been embroidering The criers, undulating the deep-oceaned phrase. French flowers on it. The lines are much too dark and much too sharp. Not by way of romance, The mind herein atttains simplicity, Here is nothing of the ideal, There is no moon, no single, silvered leaf. Nein, The body is no body to be seen Nein. But is an eye that studies its black lid. It would have been different, Let these be your delight, secretive hunter, Liebchen, Wading the sea-lines, moist and ever-mingling, If I had imagined myself, Mounting the earth-lines, long and lax, lethargic. In an orange gown, These lines are swift and fall without diverging. Drifting through space, Like a figure on the church-wall. 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.

107 1o6 III '· I measure myself Against a tall tree. I find that I am much taller, For I reach right up to the sun, Six Significant Landscapes With my eye; And I reach to the shore of the sea I With my ear. Nevertheless, I dislike An old man sits The way the ants crawl In the shadow of a pine tree In and out of my shadow. In China. He sees larkspur, Blue and white, IV At the edge of the shadow, When my dream was near the moon, Move in the wind. The white folds of its gown His beard moves in the wind. Filled with yellow light. The pine tree moves in the wind. The soles of its feet Thus water flows Grew red. Over weeds. Its hair filled With certain blue crystallizations II From stars, Not far off. The night is of the color Of a woman's arm: Night, the female, v Obscure, Not all the knives of the lamp-posts, Fragrant and supple, Nor the chisels of the long streets, Conceals herself. Nor the mallets of the domes A pool shines, And high towers, Uk:e a bracelet Can carve Shaken in a dance. What one star can carve, 108 Shining through the grape-leaves. 109 VI Rationalists, wearing square hats, Think, in square rooms, L-Ooking at the floor, L-Ooking at the ceiling. Bantams in Pine-Woods They confine themselves , To right-angled triangles. . C hieftain Iffucan of Azcan in caftan If they tried rhomboids, Of tan with henna hackles, halt! Cones, waving lines, ellipses-- As for example, the ellipse of the half-moon­ Damned universal cock, as if the sun Rationalists would wear sombreros. 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.

I II

110 Anecdote of the Jar Palace of the Babies I placed a jar in Tennessee, The disbeliever walked the moonlit place, And round it was, upon a hill. Outside of gates of hammered serafin, It made the slovenly wilderness Observing the moon-blotches on the walls. S~rround that hill. The yellow rocked across the still fac;ades, The wilderness rose up to it, Or else sat spinning on the pinnacles, And sprawled around, no longer wild. While he imag~ned humming sounds and sleep. The jar was round upon the ground And tall and of a port in air. The walker in the moonlight walked alone, And each blank window of the building balked It took dominion everywhere. His loneliness and what was in his mind: The jar was gray and bare. It did not give of bird or bush, If in a shimmering room the babies came, Like nothing else in Tennessee. 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.

Ill II3 Frogs Eat Butterflies. Snakes Eat Jasmine's Beautiful Thoughts Frogs. Hogs Eat Snakes. Underneath the Willow Men Eat Hogs M y titillations have no foot-notes It is true that the rivers went nosing like swine, And their memorials are the phrases Tugging at banks, until they seemed Of idiosyncratic music. Bland belly-sounds in somnolent troughs, The love that will not be transported That the air was heavy with the breath of these swine, In an old, frizzled, flambeaued manner, The breath of turgid summer, and But muses on its eccentricity, Heavy with thunder's rattapallax, Is like a vivid apprehension That the man who erected this cabin, planted Of bliss beyond the mutes of plaster, This field, and tended it awhi•le, Or paper souvenirs of rapture, Knew not the quirks of imagery, Of bliss submerged beneath appearance, That the hours of his indolent, arid days, In an interior ocean's rocking Grotesque with this nosing in banks, Of long, capricious fugues and chorals. This somnolence and rattapallax,

Seemed to suckle themselves on his arid being, As the swine-like rivers suckled themselves Whi:le they went seaward to the sea-mouths.

II4 As they tread the boards In a region of frost, Viewing the frost.

To a chirr of gongs Cortege for Rosenbloom And a chitter of cries And the heavy thrum N ow, the wry Rosenbloom is dead Of the endless tread And his finical carriers tread, That they tread. On a hundred legs, the tread Of .the dead. To a jangle of doom Rosenbloom is dead. And a jumble of words Of the intense poem They carry the wizened one Of the strictest prose Of the color of horn Of Rosenbloom. To the sullen hill, Treading a tread And they bury him there, In unison for the dead. Body and soul, In a place in the sk:y. Rosenbloom is dead. The lamentable tread! The tread of the carriers does not halt Rosenbloom is dead. 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 n6 117 Tattoo The Bird with the Coppery, Keen The light is like a spider. Claws It crawls over the water. A hove the forest of the parakeets, It crawls over the edges of the snow. A parakeet of parakeets prevails, It crawls under your eyelids A pip of life amid a mort of tails. And spreads its webs there- Its two webs. (The rudiments of tropics are around, The webs of your eyes Aloe of ivory, pear of rusty rind.) Are fastened His lids are white because his eyes are blind. To the flesh and bones of you As to rafters or grass. He is not paradise of parakeets, Of his gold ether, golden alguazil. There are filaments of your eyes Except because he broods there and is still, On the surface of the water And in the edges of the snow. 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.

118 II9 Life Is Motion I Architecture In Oklahoma, I Bonnie and Josie, What manner of building shall we build? Dressed in calico, Let us design a chastel de chastete. Danced around a stump. De pensee ..•. They cried, Never cease to deploy the structure. "Ohoyaho, Keep the laborers shouldering plinths. Ohoo" •.• Pass the whole of life earing the clink of the Celebrating the marriage Chisels of the stone-cutters cutting the stones. Of flesh and air.

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 120 121 I / To the group of Flora Coddling Hecuba? VI As they climb the flights To the closes And, finally, set guardians in the ~rounds, Overlooking whole seasons? Gray, gruesome grumblers. For no one proud, nor stiff, No 10lemn one, nor pale, IV I No chafferer, may come Let us buHd the building of light. To sully the ~nias, nor vex Push up the towers With holy or sublime ado To the cock-tops. The kremlin of kermess. These are the pointings of our edifice, Which, like a gorgeous palm, · VII Shall tuft the commonplace. These are the window-sill Only the lusty and the plenteous On which the quiet moonlight lies. Shall walk The bronze-filled plazas And the nut-shell esplanades. 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 nicb? Let us fix portals, east and west, Abhorring green-blue north and blue-green south. Our chief est 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. 122 121 I , Colloquy with a Polish Aunt The Wind Shifts Elle savait toutes les Ugendes du Paradis et tous les contes This is how the wind shifts: de la Pologn·e. Revue des Deux Mondes Like the thoughts of an old human \Vho still thinks eagerly ' And despairingly. She The wind shifts like this: How is it that my saints from Voragine, Like a human without illusions, In their embroidered slippers, touch your spleen? \Vho still feels irrational things within her. The wind shifts like this: He L'.ke humans approaching proudly, L1k_e .humans approaching angrily. Old pantaloons, duenna of the spring I This is how the wind shifts: Like a human, heavy and heavy, She Who does not care. 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 ....

125

124 Gubbinal Two Figures in Dense That strange flower, the sun. Violet Night Is just what you say. I had as lief be embraced by the porter at the hotel Have it your way. As to get no more from the moonlight Than your moist hand. The world is ugly, And the people are sad. Be the voice of night and Florida in my ear. Use dusky words and dusky images. That tuft of jungle feathers, Darken your speech. That animal eye, Is just what you say. Speak:, even, as if I did not hear you speaking, But spoke for you perfectly in my thoughts, That savage of fire, Conceiving words, That seed, " } Have it your way. As the nrght conceives the sea-sounds in silence, And out of their droning sibilants makes The world is ugly, A serenade. And the people are sad. 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; Th~t the moon shines.

126 127 Theory To the One of Fictive Music I am what is around me. S ister and mother and diviner love, And of the sisterhood of the living dead Women understand this. Most near, most clear, and of the clearest bloom, One is not duchess And of the fragrant mothers the most dear A hundred yards from a carriage. And queen, and of di viner lo ve the day And flame and summer and sweet fire, no thread These, then are portraits: Of cloudy silver sprinkles• in yo ur gown A black vestibule; Its ve nom of renown, and on your head A hi·gh bed sheltered by curtains. No crown is simpler than the simple hair.

These are merely instances. 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 se rene 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, 128 129 Among the arrant spices of the sun, 0 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 Hymn from a Watermelon Pavilion Our feigning with the strange unlike, whence springs The difference that heavenly pity brings. You dweller in the dark cabin, For this, musician, in your girdle fixed To whom the watermelon is always purple, Bear other perfumes. On your pale head wear Whose garden is wind and moon, A band entwining, set with fatd stones. Unreal, give back to us what once you gave: Of the two dreams, night and day, The imagination that we spurned and crave. 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.

131 130 She searched The touch of springs, And found Concealed imaginings. She sighed, Peter Quince at the Clavier For so much melody. I Upon the bank, she stood In the cool Just as my fingers on these keys Of spent emotions. Make music, so the self-same sounds She felt, among the leaves, On my spirit make a music, too. The dew Of old devotions. Music is feeling, then, not sound ; And thus it is that what I feel, She walked upon the grass, Here in this room, desiring you, Still quavering. The winds were like her maids, Thinking of your blue-shadowed silk, On timid feet, Is music. It is like the strain Fetching her woven scarves, Waked in the elders by Susanna; Yet wavering.

I ' Of a green evening, clear and warm, A breath upon her hand She bathed in her still garden, while Muted the night. The red-eyed elders, watching, felt She turned- A cymbal crashed, The basses of their beings throb And roaring horns. In witching chords, and their thin blood Pulse pizzicati of Hosanna. III

II Soon, with a noise like tambourines, Cc.me her attendant Byzantines. In the green water, clear and warm, Susanna lay. They wondered why Susanna cried 132 Against the elders by her side i 133 And as they whispered, the refrain Was like a willow swept by rain.

Anon, their lamps' uplif:ted flame Revealed Susanna and her shame. Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird And then, the simpering Byzantines Fled, with a noise like tambourines. I Among twenty snowy mountains, IV The only moving thing Was the eye of the black bird. Beauty is momentary in the mind­ The fitful tracing of a portal; II But in the flesh it is immortal. I was of three minds, The body dies; the body's beauty lives. Like a tree So evenings die, in their green going, In which there are three blackbirds. A wave, interminably flowing. So gardens die, their meek breath scenting III The cowl of winter, done repenting. The blackbird whirled in the autumn winds. So maidens die, to the auroral It was a small part of the pantomime. Celebration of a maiden's choral.

Susanna's music touched the bawdy strings IV Of those white elders; but, escaping, A man and a woman Left only Death's ironic scraping. Are one. Now, in its immortality, it plays A man and a woman and a blackbird On the clear viol of her memory, Are one. And makes a constant sacrament of praise. v I do not know whid1 to prefer, The beauty of inflections 135 134 ! /

Or the beauty of innuendoes, I x The blackbird whistling I Or just after. At the sight of blackbirds Flying in a green light, VI Even the bawds of euphony Would cry out sharply. Icicles filled the long window W ith barbaric glass. XI The shadow of the blackbird Crossed it, to and fro. I He rode over Connecticut The mood In a glass coach. Traced in the shadow Once, a fear pierced him, An indecipherable cause. In that he mistook The shadow of his equipage VII For blackbirds. 0 thin men of H addam, Why do you imagine golden birds? XII Do you not see how the blackbird The river is moving. Walks around the feet The blackbird must be flying. Of the women about you? XIII VIII It was evening all afternoon. I know noble accents It was snowing And lucid, in escapable rhythms ; And it was going to snow. But I know, too, The blackbird sat That the blackbird is involved In the cedar-limbs. In what I know.

IX When the blackbird flew out of sight, It marked the edge Of one of many circles. 136 137 Nomad Exquisite Tea As the immense dew of Florida When the elephant's-ear in the park Brings forth Shrivelled in frost, The big-finned palm And the leaves on the paths And green vine angering for life, Ran like rats, Your lamp-light fell As the immense dew of Florida On shining pillows, Brings forth hymn and hymn Of sea-shades and sky-shades, Fro111 the beholder, Like umbrellas in Java. 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 Jlinging Forms, flames, and the flakes of flames.

13):! 139 To the Roaring Wind What sylkble are you seeking, Vocalissimus, In the distances of sleep? Speak it.

THE END

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