Opening
INTELLECTUAL THINGS
BY STANLEY J. KUNITZ
GARDEN CITY, N. Y. DOUBLEDAY, DORAN AND COMPANY, INC. MCMXXX
COPYRIGHT, 1929, 1930 BY STANLEY J. KUNITZ ALL RIGHTS RESERVED PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES AT THE COUNTRY LIFE PRESS GARDEN CITY, N. Y.
FIRST EDITION
TO HELEN PEARCE
“For the tear is an intellectual thing.”
WILLIAM BLAKE
_Certain of these poems have appeared in_
THE DIAL THE NEW AMERICAN CARAVAN POETRY: A Magazine of Verse THE NATION THE NEW REPUBLIC THE COMMONWEAL HERALD-TRIBUNE BOOKS HOUND AND HORN
Twilight Page 6
Single Vision Page 7
Particular Lullaby Page 9
Promise Me Page 10
Strange Calendar Page 11
Poem Page 12
Deciduous Branch Page 14
The Words of the Preacher Page 15
Mens Creatrix Page 16
Ambergris Page 17
Approach of Autumn Page 18
Soul’s Adventure Page 19
He Page 20
Very Tree Page 21
Prophecy on Lethe Page 23
Rape of the Leaf Page 24
Postscript Page 25
Thumb-Nail Biography Page 27
Lovers Relentlessly Page 29
Death in Moonlight Page 31
Regard of Tangents Page 32
Any History Page 33
For Proserpine Page 34
When the Dead Arise Page 36
Dissect This Silence Page 37
Parting Page 38
I Dreamed That I Was Old Page 39
Night-Piece Page 40
Invasions Page 41
Me and the Rock Page 42
Thou Unbelieving Heart Page 43
Sad Song Page 45
Elemental Metamorphosis Page 46
First Love Page 47
Last Words Page 49
Eagle Page 50
A Daughter of the Sun Is She Page 51
Motion of Wish Page 52
So Intricately Is This World Resolved Page 53
Benediction Page 54
Promenade on Any Street Page 56
Who Tears the Serpent from the Flesh Page 58
In a Strange House Page 59
Master and Mistress Page 60
Organic Bloom Page 61
Beyond Reason Page 62
Vita Nuova Page 63
INTELLECTUAL THINGS
CHANGE
DISSOLVING in the chemic vat Of time, man (gristle and fat), Corrupting on a rock in space That crumbles, lifts his impermanent face To watch the stars, his brain locked tight Against the tall revolving night. Yet is he neither here nor there Because the mind moves everywhere; And he is neither now nor then Because to-morrow comes again Foreshadowed, and the ragged wing Of yesterday’s remembering Cuts sharply the immediate moon; Nor is he always: late and soon Becoming, never being, till Becoming is a being still.
Here, Now, and Always, man would be Inviolate eternally: This is his spirit’s trinity.
GEOMETRY OF MOODS
CONCENTRICAL, the universe and I Rotated on God’s crystal axletree,
So perfectly adjusted in suspense I could not mark our split circumference,
But sphere in sphere, devotion in devotion, Was a thing of folding air, a windy motion.
My spinal pole, tipped with a globe of light, Stretched long as time into the infinite,
And when I turned to look upon the face Of love’s incarnate form, tremendous space
Inclined upon her mouth, the natural nest Where, throbbing like a bird, singed thought might rest.
Concentrical, the universe and I Rotated on God’s crystal axletree,
I core of the world, a bead in a ball of glass So pure that only Nothing could be less.
O the earth ensphered me, liberal and warm, When the curve of heaven was her sleeping arm.
Now cubical upon a fractured pole It creaks, scraping the circle of my soul.
FOR THE WORD IS FLESH
O RUINED father dead, long sweetly rotten Under the dial, the time-dissolving urn, Beware a second perishing, forgotten, Heap fallen leaves of memory to burn On the slippery rock, the black eroding heart, Before the wedged frost splits it clean apart.
The nude hand drops no sacramental flower Of blood among the tough upthrusting weeds. Senior, in this commemorative hour, What shall the quick commemorate, what deeds Ephemeral, what dazzling words that flare Like rockets from the mouth to burst in air?
Of hypochondriacs that gnawed their seasons In search of proofs, Lessius found twenty-two Fine arguments, Tolet gave sixty reasons Why souls survive. And what are they to you? And, father, what to me, who cannot blur The crystal brain with fantasies of Er,
Remembering such factual spikes as pierce The supplicating palms, and by the sea Remembering the eyes I hear the fierce Wild cry of Jesus on the holy tree, Yet have of you no syllable to keep, Only the deep rock crumbling in the deep.
Observe the wisdom of the Florentine Who, feeling death upon him, scribbled fast To make revision of a deathbed scene, Gloating that he was accurate at last. Let sons learn from their lipless fathers how Man enters hell without a golden bough.
TWILIGHT
I WAIT. I deepen in the room. Fed lions, glowing, congregate In corners, sleep and fade. For whom It may concern I, tawny, wait.
Time flowing through the window; day Spilling on the board its bright Last blood. Folding (big, gauzy, gray), A moth sits on the western light.
Sits on my heart that, darkened, drips No honey from its punctured core, Yet feeds my hands and feeds my lips. The Moon, the Moon, is at the door!
SINGLE VISION
BEFORE I am completely shriven I shall reject my inch of heaven,
Cancel my eyes, and, standing, sink Into my deepest self; there drink
Memory down. The banner of My blood, unfurled, will not be love,
Only the pity and the pride Of it, pinned to my open side.
When I have utterly refined The composition of my mind,
Shaped language of my marrow till Its forms are instant to my will,
Suffered the leaf of my heart to fall Under the wind, and, stripping all
The tender blanket from my bone, Rise like a skeleton in the sun,
I shall have risen to disown The good mortality I won.
Directly risen with the stain Of life upon my crested brain,
Which I shall shake against my ghost To frighten him, when I am lost.
Gladly, as any poison, yield My halved conscience, brightly peeled;
Infect him, since we live but once, With the unused evil in my bones.
I’ll shed the tear of souls, the true Sweat, Blake’s intellectual dew,
Before I am resigned to slip A dusty finger on my lip.
PARTICULAR LULLABY
DECLINES at evening from your eyes, Like summer slipping down a tree, Your noon-high pride: but not your wise, Your sensitive pleased beauty.
The ebb of spirit from the vase Of woman is the hurt extreme Of conscious breath. Bewilder your thighs, Wrap your long thought in a dream.
By image of all hush, a mist Of blossom on the feminine bough, Annul the runner of your wrist, The small clock going in your brow.
On present time’s derisive hope Then break, O ever of your smile: Sunbreak of lips, from radiant sleep, Dazzle the perpetually meanwhile.
PROMISE ME
ONLY, when I am sudden loss Of consequence for mind and stair, Picking my dogged way from us To whom, recessive in some where Of recollection, with the cross Fallen, the breast in disrepair:
Only, when loosening clothes, you lean Out of your window sleepily, And with luxurious, lidded mien Sniff at the bitter dark--dear she, Think somewhat gently of, between Love ended and beginning, me.
STRANGE CALENDAR
CONSIDERED by the logical brief clock That keeps no reckoning of blood’s unreason, I cannot board your minute at the dock Of this perpetual departure; I cannot wake Beside your name, for having welcomed light in a later season.
Suppose my punctual hat should not arrive To-night at that known corner where the eyes Expect: if you should stand engraved with love Until through annuals of space I came to wive Your precarious dear doom--suppose, My Early One, suppose----
Or even should your bashful feet have fled, Yet one of me, arrived, shall pace the square; And one of me shall watch your not mine bed, Breathing upon your sleep; another shall have laid Himself in the revolving rock and, ageless, wait you there.
POEM
O HEART: this is a dream I had, or not a dream. Lovingly, lovingly, I wept, but my tears did not rhyme.
In the year of my mother’s blood, when I was born, She buried my innocent head in a field, because the earth
Was sleepy with the winter. And I spoke the corn, And I cried the clover up, with the dewy mouth of my mirth.
In the honey of summer my brain conceived: a child, I flowered Over the maiden-stalks, drinking sweet upper light,
For I was intimate with the sun, till he devoured Me utterly, O Heart, his tenderest neophyte.
So I died. Small gluttonous birds picked on my limpid brow, My pale drooped feet were manacled with rushing worms;
And when I was sufficiently dead (Torturer Thou!) I was born again. Dissolving, memory reforms
The cyclic hour I pulled life’s bony root, slow inch By inch, from its loamy trap; shrilly, like a mandrake, screamed
To rip the cord, suck liberal air, after the pinch Of planetary rock. Womanly, a shadow combed
Her dark tremendous hair beyond the violet border Of my sleep. Strong passionate hands I had, but could not find
The red position of her heart, nor the subtle order Of her lips and breasts, nor the breathing cities of her mind.
Lovingly, lovingly, I wept for her absent eyes, Large pity of her thought; I broke the spine of my pride
Upon a stone, seeing she did not recognize My tears, because our sorrows did not coincide.
Softly grieving, ironic with a smile forlorn, I took my baffled head and buried it under the corn.
O Heart: this is a dream I had, or not a dream.
DECIDUOUS BRANCH
WINTER, that coils in the thickets now, Will glide from the fields; the swinging rain Be knotted with flowers; on every bough A bird will meditate again.
Lord, in the night if I should die, Who entertained your thrilling worm, Corruption wastes more than the eye Can pick from this imperfect form.
I lie awake, hearing the drip Upon my sill; thinking, the sun Has not been promised; we may strip Passion to seed, and be undone.
Bleed, as the antler of the eaves Vanishes, drop by drop. I brood On a Christian thing: unless the leaves Perish, the tree is not renewed.
If all our perishable stuff Be nourished to its rot, we clean Our trunk of death, and in our tough And final growth are evergreen.
THE WORDS OF THE PREACHER
TAKING infection from the vulgar air And sick with the extravagant disease Of life, my soul rejected the sweet snare Of happiness; declined That democratic bait, set in the world By fortune’s old and mediocre mind.
To love a changing shape with perfect faith Is waste of faith; to follow dying things With deathless hope is vain; to go from breath To breath, so to be fed And put to sleep, is cheat and shame--because By piecemeal living a man is doomed, I said.
For time with clever fingers ties the knot Of life that is extended like a rope, And bundling up the spinning of our thought (The ribbons and the lace That might have made a garment for the wind), Constricts our substance to a cipher’s space.
Into the middle of my thought I crept And on the bosom of the angel lay, Lived all my life at once; and oh I wept My own future to be; Upon his death-soft burning plumage wept To vie with God for His eternity.
MENS CREATRIX
BRAIN, be ice, A frozen bowl of thought, Pure radius of the marble eye That is time’s central spot: In cold eternal calm Chasten the trembling thigh.
Brain, brain: Be fever’s sepulcher, Entomb the noise of frightened blood, That I may strictly hear The truthful pulse of beauty Beyond this evil good.
Mental womb, Intelligence of tight Precision: He comes, the sudden Lord, A rhythmic Spike of Light, To cleave you with that spike: Himself, His flowing Word.
Strike, O Poem, Strike!
AMBERGRIS
THIS body, tapped of every drop of breath, In vast corruption of its swollen pride, Is perfected to be the whale of death; Yet, I believe, the hand that plumbs its side Will gather dissolution’s sweet increase, Exquisite fern of death--in nature, ambergris.
Meanwhile, thinking of love, I have been dressed For such destruction. Though it surely break, Come pluck the deep wild kernel of my breast, That wafer of devotion, and partake Of its compacted sweetness, till it bring The soul to rise upon the fleshly wing.
If gentle hearts are scorned, in scorn of it I shall immerse it in such bitterness, Bathe every pulse in such an acid wit, That from my mammoth, cold, and featureless Event of age, my enemies will flee, Whereas my friends will stay and pillage me.
APPROACH OF AUTUMN
THE early violets we saw together, Lifting their delicate swift heads As if to dip them in the water, now wither, Arching no more like thoroughbreds.
Slender and pale, they flee the rime Of death: the ghosts of violets Are running in a dream. Heart-flowering time Decays, green goes, and the eye forgets.
Forgets? But what spring-blooded stock Sprouts deathless violets in the skull, That, pawing on the hard and bitter rock Of reason, make thinking beautiful?
SOUL’S ADVENTURE
I HEARD the centuries tick slowly, Earth’s pulse equivocate. O Lord, Gigantic silence strikes: Thy holy And undeniable Word.
This is the bitter promised day When, dragging wings, I leave behind A faun-like head upon a tray, Spear buried in the mind.
Now I must tread the starry wrack And penetrate the burning sea. Iscariot, I may come back, But do not wait for me.
HE
HE runs before the wise men: He Is moving on the hills like snow. No gifts, no tears, no company He brings, but wind-rise and water-flow.
In meadows of descended day His motion leans, dividing air: He takes the unforgiving way Beneath the apostolic star.
Mary, Mary, call Him Stranger. Parting the night’s long hair, He steals Within the heart, that humble manger Where the white, astonished spirit kneels.
His vertical inflicting pride, Whose shadow cuts the nib of space, Bends to this virtue fructified. But though He kiss the little face
Like rapture breaking on the mind, The necessary fierce details Implacably He has designed. Redemption hangs upon the nails.
VERY TREE
FORGET the tube of bark, Alliterative leaves, Tenacious like a hand Gnarled rootage in the dark Interior of land.
Bright incidental bird Whose melody is fanned Among the bundled sheaves, Wild spool of the winding word, Reject: and let there be Only tree.
Earth’s absolute arithmetic Of being is not in the flowering stick Filled with the sperm of sun, But in a figure seen By second eyes when we close Slow petals of the brain At evening like a rose.
Colors pour in and out: Here is a timeless structure wrought Like the candelabrum of pure thought, Stripped of green root and leaf, Getting no seed to sprout,
Yet lovely, lovely, God’s Very Tree, Form of whose intense inner life Abstractly branches to attain What glory, Tree, what pain?
PROPHECY ON LETHE
ECHO, the beating of the tide, Infringes on the blond curved shore; Archaic weeds from sleep’s green side Bind skull and pelvis till the four Seasons of the blood are unified.
Anonymous sweet carrion, Blind mammal floating on the stream Of depthless sound, completely one In the cinnamon-dark of no dream-- A pod of silence, bursting when the sun
Clings to the forehead, will surprise The gasping turtle and the leech With your strange brain blooming as it lies Abandoned to the bipeds on the beach; Your jelly-mouth and, crushed, your polyp eyes.
RAPE OF THE LEAF
WATERED by light, this done catastrophe Was written in the seed. Who shall condemn My wintry hand for leaping in a tree To tear a tender pattern from its stem?
I swear no malice pulled the mental string Of fate’s deflowering arm. I count it grief To contradict the buds, to murder spring In summer’s blood, by this lone crumpled leaf.
All shade, all greenness, rolled into a ball, Are prisoners of my palm. And shall I let, Like autumn, vegetation’s empire fall, Or stay the curve of time, so to forget
The imminence of God’s great roving eye? Electric of my heart, we cannot shun That fatal stare. But while the buzzards cry, Wear not a scarlet jacket in the sun.
Postscript
DARLING, darling, by narrow ambages Of fate, by gardens flowering with beasts, I came unto this place. The forest marches Behind the stalker, and the running grass Steps lightly over his defeated bones. This is the perilous way without return. In glassy prison now of contemplation I, fugitive from progress, leap erect In analytic dance on time’s acute And bitter needle. Crueler than a spine It penetrates the body till it pricks The bubbling brain, exploding life’s gray tumor Together with its iridescent world. I lost by winning, and I shall not win Again except by loss. The smoky past, Mixed with the wind, will not evaporate Into the color of air. Let life be false, But in our circular trap the blood remembers Its throbbing on the lip; the hands observe Communion, touching in the sleep of thought; And the punctual heart reiterates love’s name. Some little comfort I have found to think That, though this phœnix will not hatch an egg, Yet will its lyric history be saved In generations of its mental brood. And I have found some little comfort too In colloquy with death the quiet-eyed, Our profound and inexhaustible old father, Still loyal to his tall obedient sons. I have been social with the pale abstractions That congregate within a lethal room; But these strict walls encounter me; this house Exhales resentment of audacious hope. A man can starve upon the golden-sweet Impossible apples of Cézanne; a man Can eagerly consult a woman’s head (Picasso’s), but her slow and stupid eyes Drink light in vegetative apathy. O darling, a man can cry unto his love All night and day, and still be comfortless. The meaning of a mouth, a breast, is plain, But what you mean to me is dipped in blood And tangled like the bright threads of a dream.
THUMB-NAIL BIOGRAPHY
DISEASE has profited Her soul, that now can shake From it the flower that is dead; Scatter old ache
From her identity; Distilling in each vein Mature and steady ecstasy Of blood and brain.
As delicate knobs of bloom Beneath electric light Accelerate their constant doom In the false Bright,
Her dim corolla-love, Believing there was sun, Received too early shivering proof Of corruption.
Nourished by any rain, Blest in whatever spring, Her seed will not be stirred again With blossoming;
Whose incorruptible stem Persists by growth, and stands Lovely ... impregnable to limb, Eyes, hands....
LOVERS RELENTLESSLY
LOVERS relentlessly contend to be Superior in their identity:
The compass of the ego is designed To circumscribe intact a lesser mind
With definition; tender thought would wrest Each clean protective secret from the breast;
Affection’s eyes go deep, make morbid lesion In pride’s tissue, are ferocious with possession;
Love’s active hands insistently caress The quivering body of shy loveliness,
Hands that are desperately moved to own The subtly reasoned flesh on branching bone;
Lovers regard the simple moon that spills White magic in a garden, bend their wills
Obliquely on each other; lovers eat The small ecstatic heart to be complete;
Engaged in complicate analysis Of passionate destruction, lovers kiss;
In furious involvement they would make A double meaning single. Some must break
Upon the wheel of love, but not the strange, The secret lords, whom only death can change.
DEATH IN MOONLIGHT
A LEOPARD no more secret Is than she who goes By night alone, observing Moon-foam upon the rose;
A doe is not more gentle Than she who palely treads Through peonies’ white clusters, Brushing small rabbit-heads;
Her steps are light as dewdrops Among imagined sheep, Timid that she may startle A herd of rocks from sleep;
She tarries for a moment Beside a sky-deep pond To watch a floating turtle; Enchanted, moves beyond
To greet a glittering forest, A tall and starry town. Supple, her proud sweet body Crying plunges down.
REGARD OF TANGENTS
THE flesh has knowledge of the flesh. Lean hip and deep familiar breast Encounter opposites. Melodiously Beats (O beats!) the bringing bird of wish.
So has the adult thirsty bread Been dipped in song: still is a thirst Intrinsic in the body’s briefest crumb, As shapes of thought go snuggling to a bed
Where double joy may singly lie, Or once might probably have lain. For love is coming or is passing by, And none may look upon her features plain.
How shall these tarry, how shall these meet, When he must remember and she forget? Her baby-heart is running down a street Already ended, his to a place not yet.
ANY HISTORY
INVOLVING in an active knot The nimble members of our thought,
Rigid we lean, our bodies straining To the lifting rhythms of the blood;
With eyes, with lips, with hands, explaining This passion of the double rood.
Though mind’s tall swaying organisms, Like pulsing flowers, twist head on head,
As pricked with cruel antagonisms They spring out of a common bed,
Be reconciled. Soon will be over The hot war, the heart’s loud argument:
Calm lover then will lie with lover In snug and arrowy content,
Yet long to feel the leaping thunder Of desire, the vesseled lightning burn,
And grieve to hold a wild quick wonder Made familiar. Then we shall turn
Tame faces to the wall to weep, And timidly, like children, sleep.
FOR PROSERPINE
OUR purple tongues that testify The pomegranate has been broken Are stained, their roots and buds are stained, with the shy Fruity pleasure of us, met, spoken.
(I shall remember the days Of my youth and your beautiful new ways.)
In fierce decay I’ll find a stripe Of honey sweetening the tart Old brain. I shall not know again such ripe Beauty of the burst, dark heart.
(I’ll think of my absurd, Impossible, pledged, serious word.)
My undivulged interior world A country for our souls shall be, Till I am done with name and number, gnarled And mindless like a babbling tree.
(A heavy bird will brood On women stagnant in their blood.)
Preserve you from the long farewell Whose sex is flowers, whose breasts are grain. Return, return. Into a leafless hell Gradually drops the brain.
(The bulls, the stallions, have tasted Incredible fruit. Their seed is wasted.)
WHEN THE DEAD ARISE
WHEN the dead arise, (You know me, Lazarus) When the resurrected generations climb Into the orb of time, Rubbing death from their eyes,
(O dark mad Lazarus) When this maggoty dumb earth Pronounces verbs erect and vertebrate, Will the sexes flow with sweet Wild honey of God’s mirth?
Or will they stare Bewildered at ascending noon; Then turn, and leap with frightened hair (Lazarus! Lazarus!) In utter pits of marble sleep
Unbetrayably down.
DISSECT THIS SILENCE
DISSECT this Silence: is it sweet and firm And long, the brain’s mysterious white Worm?
Anatomize this symmetry that winds Voluptuously till itself it finds,
Pale body flowing from a lean cold head, Flowing like water to the profound dead.
Since Silence feeds on silence, can there be, Can there become, less Silence? Chastity
And solitude and wintry sleep invite The pale and beautiful Hermaphrodite.
Dissect this Silence: though it seem pure form, Yet will you find much blood within this Worm.
And though it seem compounded of still air Beyond the memory of sound, beware
The loud, the unbelievable hurt cries Of the subtle creature you would analyze.
Dissect then if you will, O curious child, But leave the Heart of Silence undefiled.
PARTING
PARTING, I take with me completed June, Remembered hoard of time in thought compact; Eventual winds will not dissolve a tune Of solid air, the body of this fact. Mind’s acres are forever green: Oh, I Shall keep perpetual summer here; I shall Refuse to let one startled swallow die, One petal of this colored beauty fall.
Here, wandered from confusion, I shall greet My youth immaculate in memory’s urn; This is my country, where the tireless feet Of my adventure, homing, will return. Each day will end in this day; every ship Will bring me back, bright lip on lonely lip.
I DREAMED THAT I WAS OLD
I DREAMED that I was old: in stale declension Fallen from my prime, when company Was mine, cat-nimbleness, and green invention, Before time took my leafy hours away.
My wisdom, ripe with body’s ruin, found Itself tart recompense for what was lost In false exchange: since wisdom in the ground Has no apocalypse or pentecost.
I wept for my youth, sweet passionate young thought, And cozy women dead that by my side Once lay: I wept with bitter longing, not Remembering how in my youth I cried.
NIGHT-PIECE
AND everywhere, all over, men have sighed Good-night, remembering of women the bright Of eyes; put out their bodies like a light, And set their brains adrift upon their blood.
Let us be shy again like feathered things, Stroll in the gardens of the spectrum (all Last summer). Waiting for the first snowfall, Hear colors dropping, and the dark flurry of wings.
Prevent that deepmost dream. Think late, think soon, Of crickets, Marvell, roses, and the bare Shoulders of teasing Venus, and O the hair Tumbling all over, everywhere, the moon.
Up ever so many stairs it is a new Sweet (look! it’s) morning in each other’s arms. Tell me, yes I truly, by what charms Have I been, darling, yes I really do.
I think that it is so: but did I scream Out of my middle sleep, believe I saw The great fish tunneling the purple sea, Earth-darkening bird suspended over dream.
INVASIONS
WE two. And so? But if the bell should pounce On us, our shadows beating on the wall; But if commotion shake the dark, announce (Floating up the staircase to the hall) Some body staring at the door--no any word, No any not at all, eliminates that Third.
We are not here: not all of us is here. Men carry in the streets, forgotten quite, Kept parcels of our lives ... a day, a year. The mirrors of my honest love are bright And steal your attitudes. Your flowing name is signed And countersigned. I wrap you in green folds of mind.
Smiling and smiling, when the crumpled hand Of your farewell will linger in the air, Death like a photograph will, taken, stand In hallways of my heart, on every stair. (Shadows and bells.) Death in your image, entering me, Will drag my clinging spirit out, lovingly.
ME AND THE ROCK
ENDLESSLY to no end wending Pilgrim O my conscience in the green Nacre of twilight abbreviate the heart
Autumn’s beak is to the south Death is north; westward one minute late The plumed train leaps the shrilly stark ravine Ever go feet go cars go the planes
Hearing the motors of the breast the brain Loudly I wait their destinations wait
Coals of remembrance kissed and broken These are the eyes; treasure the moment pure Arrived at beauty impossible and vain
Now between me and the rock is Now between me and myself is Sight of the rock thought of myself: division sure
Then will the mouth of the air open Cold slowly desolation pour over the blind Punctures of sleep great gorges of the mind Render me imperturbable to the rock Deliver to myself completely me
THOU UNBELIEVING HEART
LADY that flutters in the bridal cage Waiting love’s absent lord, Count not the coinage of the sun So artlessly. Have you not seen The loping stranger pictured on your floor? Innocent Lady, have you not heard The beast that thunders at your door?
You have spent your female faith In him whom you denied; You have sent him to his death, And he went forth proud With his hawk and his meek-eyed hound. Lady, the bird still screams, The old dog licks his hand, Do not study your dreams.
The feet of your lord in swift Pursuit are terrible Like flames. When you are left No longer beautiful, A tumbled tower of bone, Still will he follow that death, With hawk and hound in vain, While you, for lack of faith, Shall scream and catch your breath.
Lady that flutters in the bridal cage Waiting love’s absent lord, The beast he hunts and may not find Is hunting you who shall be found. Erase the picture from your floor. Innocent Lady, you have heard The lion thunder at your door.
SAD SONG
I MARRIED me a fay, I was a merry gnome; The wind stole my love away, In the dark the whistler came. I married me a fay. Sweet Bird, Sweet Bird, fly home.
Nine candles in a row, White sisters of the flame, Breathe lilies of my woe. When sorrowing is dumb Nine candles in a row Cry softly her sweet name.
I married me a fay, I am a withered gnome; My love comes not to-day, Nor will she ever come. I eat the stale last crumb For marrying a fay, Sweet Bird who flies not home.
ELEMENTAL METAMORPHOSIS
ALL night he ran, his body air, But that was in another year.
Lately the answered shape of his laughter, The shape of his smallest word, is fire.
He who is a fierce young crier Of poems will be tranquil as water,
Keeping, in aged rose calm, one sure Set image depthlessly secure;
Then enter earth and come to be, Inch by inch, geography.
FIRST LOVE
AT his incipient sun The ice of twenty winters broke, Crackling, in her eyes.
Her mirroring, still mind, That held the world (made double) calm, Went fluid, and it ran.
There was a stir of music, Mixed with flowers, in her blood; A swift impulsive balm
From obscure roots; gold bees Of clinging light swarmed in her brow. This Beautiful is good,
This Wonderful is true. Love’s large, slow, motherly hands have touched Like years: quietly now
The blind impalpable lids Of prescient selves, opening, start Upon an astral view.
Her throat is full of songs, She hums, she is sensible of wings Growing on her heart.
She is a tree in spring Trembling with the hope of leaves, Of which the leaves are tongues.
LAST WORDS
LISTEN: from sleep’s long pillow I arise To go away. One moment let me lean On falling air before I lock my eyes. Are the leaves red now? No matter. Trees are green.
The colors of the world are permanent Despite the bleach of change. Pure stain on stain The bow of light’s eternal forms is bent Across steep heaven in the general brain.
Who cries, The beautiful, the proud, are fallen! (O silly child, it was myself that cried.) Death, eater of the heads of flowers, spills pollen: Our little strength, our beauty, and our pride
Are for the race to keep; we can discover Secrets with our broken skulls; our dead feet run Under the lid of earth that closes over The generations marching to the sun.
EAGLE
THE dwindling pole, Tall perpendicular in air, Attenuates to be a bird Poised on a sphere.
No flag projects This tensile grace, this needle-word, Only, in rigid attitude, The ball, the bird.
Metallic time Has caught an eagle, trapped the beat Of rushing wings, ensnared in bronze His taloned feet.
Invader of The thunder, never will you fly Again to pluck the blazing heart. Shall I? Shall I?
A DAUGHTER OF THE SUN IS SHE
A DAUGHTER of the sun is she, Delicate and neat, Whom a divine geometry Has made complete.
The subtle air was spun with fire For a body bright and wild, Immaculate in clean desire, A strange wise child.
With elemental grace of wind Her symmetry is plain; Precisely is each thought defined In her dainty brain.
Her secret will not keep the night. What will her lover say When, springing on a horse of light, She rides away?
MOTION OF WISH
THROUGH evolutions of the seed To startled postures of the dead, The motion of important wish Is simpler than the motion of a fish In water, or a bird in air. Sprung from the brain, it will return there. Possessed by objects, wish may find Mastery only in the mind. So when the sighing of the shoal, The tropic birds, the monotonous roll Of seasons over the island soul, Confuse hope’s mirror, mariners eat One lotus-moment to forget All other moments, and their eyes Fasten on impossible surprise. A man may journey to the sun, But his one true love and companion Sleeps curled in his thoughtful womb. Here will the lone life-traveler come To find himself infallibly home.
SO INTRICATELY IS THIS WORLD RESOLVED
SO intricately is this world resolved Of substance arched on thrust of circumstance, The earth’s organic meaning so involved, That none may break the pattern of his dance; Lest, deviating, he confound the line Of reason with the destiny of race, And, altering the perilous design, Bring ruin like a rain on time and space.
Lover, it is good to lie in the sweet grass With a dove-soft nimble girl. But O lover, Lift no destroying hand; let fortune pass Unchallenged, beauty sleep; dare not to cover Her mouth with kisses by the garden wall, Lest, cracking in bright air, a planet fall.
BENEDICTION
GOD banish from your house The fly, the roach, the mouse
That riots in the walls Until the plaster falls;
Admonish from your door The hypocrite and liar;
No shy, soft, tigrish fear Permit upon your stair,
Nor agents of your doubt. God drive them whistling out.
Let nothing touched with evil, Let nothing that can shrivel
Heart’s tenderest frond, intrude Upon your still, deep blood.
Against the drip of night God keep all windows tight,
Protect your mirrors from Surprise, delirium,
Admit no trailing wind Into your shuttered mind
To plume the lake of sleep With dreams. If you must weep
God give you tears, but leave You secrecy to grieve,
And islands for your pride, And love to nest in your side.
God grant that, to the bone, Yourself may be your own;
God grant that I may be (My sweet) sweet company.
PROMENADE ON ANY STREET
HE passes through the crowd, Inimical and proud.
Beneath the shifting sky He bears young majesty,
A secret crown of stars Among the whistling cars.
Under his springing heels, Cleft shadow-roots, he feels
The massive planet turning. Through pinioned heaven burning
Marches his eager head, Seeking, as light runs red,
A virginal release From motion, April peace;
While muddy feet patrol The carpet of a soul
That falls like snow between The mob and the machine.
None hears his heart cry, Stop! None takes his echo up.
Beneath his gray felt hat Leaps thought, the acrobat.
WHO TEARS THE SERPENT FROM THE FLESH
ITS evil head that gnaws the breast Is beautiful and bright, Emblazoned with a jeweled crest, Red plume of light.
The body of its reptile grace, Glitter of gold and green, Winds rippling in fastidious chase Of heart’s meat clean.
Who tears the serpent from the flesh To stamp a bloody seal, And laughs, inflicting gash on gash With his iron heel,
Will thirst to fill in spirit’s drought The vacant well of pain, And stoop to kiss the serpent’s mouth, And kiss in vain.
IN A STRANGE HOUSE
THE memory of time is here imprisoned In these walls, not fluent time that moves Upon the flood, but time already reasoned And undone of its quick eyes and loves.
We who are strangers in this finished house Have slept with noiseless shadows, and we lie Astonished in our chambers lest we rouse The sleeping moments with an awful cry.
The dead would murder action. Oh I know Their subtle ways. They separate with fear The fiery lips of thought. And I shall go By silent lanes and leave you timeless here.
MASTER AND MISTRESS
AS if I were composed of dust and air, The shape confronting me upon the stair (Athlete of shadow, lighted by a stain On its disjunctive breast--I saw it plain--) Moved through my middle flesh. I turned around, Shaken, and it was marching without sound Beyond the door; and when my hand was taken From my mouth to beat the standing heart, I cried My distant name, thinking myself had died. One moment I was entered; one moment then I knew a bounded century of pain Between the twinkling of two thoughts. The ghost Knocked on my ribs, demanding, “Host! Host! I am diseased with motion. Give me bread Before I quickly go. Shall I be fed?” Straightly I yielded up: “Partake of me. Whatever runneth from the artery, This body and its unfamiliar wine, Stored in whatever dark of love, are thine.” But he denied me, saying, “Every part Of thee is given, yea, thy flesh, thy heart.”
ORGANIC BLOOM
THE brain constructs its systems to enclose The steady paradox of thought and sense; Momentously its tissued meaning grows To solve and integrate experience. But life escapes closed reason. We explain Our chaos into cosmos, cell by cell, Only to learn of some insidious pain Beyond the limits of our charted hell; Only to find a startling grief, a sin Incredible and true. So, vast and vaster The plasmic circles of gray discipline Spread outward to include each new disaster. Enormous floats the brain’s organic bloom Till, bursting like a fruit, it scatters doom.
BEYOND REASON
THE blessing in this conscious fruit, the hurt Which is unanswerable, fill the brow With early death. O Sion of my heart, The milk of love were charitable now.
I do not come intent to be your lord, Nor to contract the empire of your flight, But as the long eye holds the spinning bird Enclosed in the circumference of sight
And yet the bird is infinitely free To dip its beak into the thinnest air, So do I stand. I am not destiny To color time or plot a hemisphere.
Creatures that carry in their little blood Malignant influences moved to keep Delight from love, the lonely from the proud, Destroy themselves to live. If in my sleep
The ape, the serpent, and the fox I find Shut with my soul in fortune’s writhing sack, I tame them with the sections of my mind And teach my mind to love its thoughtless crack.
VITA NUOVA
I ABDICATE my daily self that bled, As others breathe, for porridge it might sup. Henceforth apocalypse will get my bread For me. I bit my tongue and gnawed my lip, But now the visor of my name is up.
Giving to love my undivided nature, Cherishing beauty with the breath I keep, I have been otherwise a part-time creature, With many selves to fool myself with hope, And in myself a gentler self to weep.
Now I will peel that vision from my brain Of numbers wrangling in a common place, And I will go, unburdened, on the quiet lane Of my eternal kind, till shadowless With inner light I wear my father’s face.
Moon of the soul, accompany me now, Shine on the coliseums of my sense, Be in the tabernacles of my brow. My dark will make, reflecting thee at once, The single beam of all my life intense.