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IF THE BOOK IS UNDER COPYRIGHT IN YOUR COUNTRY, DO NOT DOWNLOAD OR REDISTRIBUTE THIS FILE. _Title:_ The Collected Later Poems of William Carlos Williams _Date of first publication:_ 1944 _Author:_ William Carlos Williams (1883-1963) _Date first posted:_ Sep. 21, 2019 _Date last updated:_ Sep. 21, 2019 Faded Page eBook #20190953 This eBook was produced by: Al Haines, Jen Haines & the online Distributed Proofreaders Canada team at https://www.pgdpcanada.net [Cover Illustration] =_The Collected Later Poems of_= WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS =_A NEW DIRECTIONS BOOK_= Copyright 1944, 1948, and 1950 by William Carlos Williams Manufactured in the United States of America by The Haddon Craftsmen, Inc., Scranton, Pa. New Directions Books are published by James Laughlin at Norfolk, Connecticut. New York Office: 333 Sixth Avenue (14) Designed by Maurice Serle Kaplan _To James Laughlin_ =_Contents_= _The Wedge_ 1 _The Clouds_ 63 _Ballad of Faith_ 129 _All That Is Perfect in Woman_ 137 _The Rat_ 143 _Choral: The Pink Church_ 157 _Incognito_ 163 _The Birth of Venus_ 187 _14 New Poems (1950)_ 193 _Two Pendants: for the Ears_ 211 INDEX OF POEMS BY TITLES 247 =_Acknowledgments_= Some of the poems in this volume were first printed in the following magazines: Arizona Quarterly, Botteghe Oscure, Briarcliff Quarterly, Calendar, Contemporary Poetry, Fantasy, Furioso, General Magazine (U. of P.), Harper’s Bazaar, Harvard Wake, Hemispheres, Kenyon Review, The Nation, New Directions, The New Leader, New Poems 1940, The New Republic, The New Yorker, Palisade, Partisan Review, The Poet of the Year, Poetry, a Magazine of Verse, Poets at Work, The Quarterly Review of Literature, The Tiger’s Eye, View, VVV, Yale Poetry Review, and Zero. _=The Wedge=_ _Author’s Introduction (1944)_ The war is the first and only thing in the world today. The arts generally are not, nor is this writing a diversion from that for relief, a turning away. It is the war or part of it, merely a different sector of the field. Critics of rather better than average standing have said in recent years that after socialism has been achieved it’s likely there will be no further use for poetry, that it will disappear. This comes from nothing else than a faulty definition of poetry—and the arts generally. I don’t hear anyone say that mathematics is likely to be outmoded, to disappear shortly. Then why poetry? It is an error attributable to the Freudian concept of the thing, that the arts are a resort from frustration, a misconception still entertained in many minds. They speak as though action itself in all its phases were not compatible with frustration. All action the same. But Richard Coeur de Lion wrote at least one of the finest lyrics of his day. Take Don Juan for instance. Who isn’t frustrated and does not prove it by his actions—if you want to say so? But through art the psychologically maimed may become the most distinguished man of his age. Take Freud for instance. The making of poetry is no more an evidence of frustration than is the work of Henry Kaiser or Timoshenko. It’s the war, the driving forward of desire to a complex end. And when that shall have been achieved, mathematics and the arts will turn elsewhere—beyond the atom if necessary for their reward and let’s all be frustrated together. A man isn’t a block that remains stationary though the psychologists treat him so—and most take an insane pride in believing it. Consistency! He varies; Hamlet today, Caesar tomorrow; here, there, somewhere—if he is to retain his sanity, and why not? The arts have a complex relation to society. The poet isn’t a fixed phenomenon, no more is his work. That might be a note on current affairs, a diagnosis, a plan for procedure, a retrospect—all in its own peculiarly enduring form. There need be nothing limited or frustrated about that. It may be a throw-off from the most violent and successful action or run parallel to it, a saga. It may be the picking out of an essential detail for memory, something to be set aside for further study, a sort of shorthand of emotional significances for later reference. Let the metaphysical take care of itself, the arts have nothing to do with it. They will concern themselves with it if they please, among other things. To make two bald statements: There’s nothing sentimental about a machine, and: A poem is a small (or large) machine made of words. When I say there’s nothing sentimental about a poem I mean that there can be no part, as in any other machine, that is redundant. Prose may carry a load of ill-defined matters like a ship. But poetry is the machine which drives it, pruned to a perfect economy. As in all machines its movement is intrinsic, undulant, a physical more than a literary character. In a poem this movement is distinguished in each case by the character of the speech from which it arises. Therefore each speech having its own character the poetry it engenders will be peculiar to that speech also in its own intrinsic form. The effect is beauty, what in a single object resolves our complex feelings of propriety. One doesn’t seek beauty. All that an artist or a Sperry can do is to drive toward his purpose, in the nature of his materials; not to take gold where Babbitt metal is called for; to make: make clear the complexity of his perceptions in the medium given to him by inheritance, chance, accident or whatever it may be to work with according to his talents and the will that drives them. Don’t talk about frustration fathering the arts. The bastardization of words is too widespread for that today. My own interest in the arts has been extracurricular. Up from the gutter, so to speak. Of necessity. Each age and place to its own. But in the U. S. the necessity for recognizing this intrinsic character has been largely ignored by the various English Departments of the academies. When a man makes a poem, makes it, mind you, he takes words as he finds them interrelated about him and composes them—without distortion which would mar their exact significances—into an intense expression of his perceptions and ardors that they may constitute a revelation in the speech that he uses. It isn’t what he says that counts as a work of art, it’s what he makes, with such intensity of perception that it lives with an intrinsic movement of its own to verify its authenticity. Your attention is called now and then to some beautiful line or sonnet-sequence because of what is said there. So be it. To me all sonnets say the same thing of no importance. What does it matter what the line “says”? There is no poetry of distinction without formal invention, for it is in the intimate form that works of art achieve their exact meaning, in which they most resemble the machine, to give language its highest dignity, its illumination in the environment to which it is native. Such war, as the arts live and breathe by, is continuous. It may be that my interests as expressed here are pre-art. If so I look for a development along these lines and will be satisfied with nothing else. _=A Sort of a Song=_ Let the snake wait under his weed and the writing be of words, slow and quick, sharp to strike, quiet to wait, sleepless. —through metaphor to reconcile the people and the stones. Compose. (No ideas but in things) Invent! Saxifrage is my flower that splits the rocks. _=Catastrophic Birth=_ Fury and counter fury! The volcano! Stand firm, unbending. The chemistry shifts. The retort does not fracture. The change reveals—change. The revelation is compact— compact of regathered fury By violence lost, recaptured by violence violence alone opens the shell of the nut. The best is hard to say—unless near the break. Unless the shell hold the kernel is not sweet. Under violence the meat lies regained Each age brings new calls upon violence for new rewards, variants of the old. Unless each hold firm Unless each remain flexible there can be no new. The new opens new ways beyond all known ways. Shut up! laughs the big she-Wop. Wait till you have six like a me. Every year one. Come on! Push! Sure, you said it! Maybe I have one next year. Sweating like a volcano. It cleans you up, makes you feel good inside. Come on! Push! The impasse becomes a door when the wall is levelled. The cone lifts, lifts and settles back. Life goes on. The cone blocks the crater and lifts half its height. Life goes on. The orange trees bloom. The old women talk tirelessly. The laboratory announces officially that there is no need to worry. The cone is subsiding, smoke rises as a funnel into the blue unnatural sky— The change impends! A change stutters in the rocks. We believe nothing can change. The fracture will come, the death dealing chemistry cannot be long held back. The dreaded eruption blocks out the valley, the careful prognosticator as well as the idlers. The revelation is complete. Peace is reborn above the cinders Only one man is left, the drunkard who had been confined underground to rot with the rats and lizards. The old woman who had been combing out the child’s hair is also intact but at a touch she falls into a heap of ashes Only he who had been confined in disgrace underground is rescued alive and he knows nothing more of it than to stand and curse the authorities who left him there so long without food and liquor while they were digging him out Rain will fall. The wind and the birds will bring seeds, the river changes its channel and fish re-enter it. The seawind will come in from the east. The broken cone breathes softly on the edge of the sky, violence revives and regathers. _=Paterson: the Falls=_ What common language to unravel? The Falls, combed into straight lines from that rafter of a rock’s lip. Strike in! the middle of some trenchant phrase, some well packed clause. Then . . . This is my plan. 4 sections: First, the archaic persons of the drama. An eternity of bird and bush, resolved. An unraveling: the confused streams aligned, side by side, speaking! Sound married to strength, a strength of falling—from a height! The wild voice of the shirt-sleeved Evangelist rivaling, Hear me! I am the Resurrection and the Life! echoing among the bass and pickerel, slim eels from Barbados, Sargasso Sea, working up the coast to that bounty, ponds and wild streams— Third, the old town: Alexander Hamilton working up from St. Croix, from that sea! and a deeper, whence he came! stopped cold by that unmoving roar, fastened there: the rocks silent but the water, married to the stone, voluble, though frozen; the water even when and though frozen still whispers and moans— And in the brittle air a factory bell clangs, at dawn, and snow whines under their feet. Fourth, the modern town, a disembodied roar! the cataract and its clamor broken apart—and from all learning, the empty ear struck from within, roaring . . . _=The Dance=_ In Breughel’s great picture, The Kermess, the dancers go round, they go round and around, the squeal and the blare and the tweedle of bagpipes, a bugle and fiddles tipping their bellies (round as the thick- sided glasses whose wash they impound) their hips and their bellies off balance to turn them. Kicking and rolling about the Fair Grounds, swinging their butts, those shanks must be sound to bear up under such rollicking measures, prance as they dance in Breughel’s great picture, The Kermess. _=Writer’s Prologue to a Play in Verse=_ In your minds you jump from doors to sad departings, pigeons, dreams of terror, to cathedrals; bowed, repelled, knees quaking, to the-closed- without-a-key or through an arch an ocean that races full of sound and foam to lay a carpet for your pleasure or a wood that waves releasing hawks and crows or crowds that elbow and fight for a place or anything. You see it in your minds and the mind at once jostles it, turns it about, examines and arranges it to suit its fancy. Or rather changes it after a pattern which is the mind itself, turning and twisting the theme until it gets a meaning or finds no meaning and is dropped. By such composition, without code, the scenes we see move and, as it may happen, make a music, a poetry which the poor poet copies if and only if he is able—to astonish and amuse, for your delights, in public, face to face with you individually and secretly addressed. We are not here, you understand, but in the mind, that circumstance of which the speech is poetry. Then look, I beg of you, try and look within yourselves rather than at me for what I shall discover. Yourselves! Within yourselves. Tell me if you do not see there, alive! a creature unlike the others, something extraordinary in its vulgarity, something strange, unnatural to the world, that suffers the world poorly, is tripped at home, disciplined at the office, greedily eats money— for a purpose: to escape the tyranny of lies. And is all they can think of to amuse you, a ball game? Or skiing in Van Diemen’s land in August —to amuse you! Do you not come here to escape that? For you are merely distracted, not relieved in the blood, deadened, defeated, stultified. But this! is new. Believe it, to be proved presently by your patience. Run through the public appearance of it, to come out—not stripped but, if you’ll pardon me, something which in the mind you are and would be yet have always been, unrecognized, tragic and foolish, without a tongue. That’s it. Yourself the thing you are, speechless—because there is no language for it, shockingly revealed. Would it disturb you if I said you have no other speech than poetry? You, yourself, I mean. There is no other language for it than the poem —falsified by the critics until you think it’s something else, fight it off, as idle, a kind of lie, smelling of corpses, that the practical world rejects. How could it be you? Never! without invention. It is, if you’ll have patience, the undiscovered language of yourself, which you avoid, rich and poor, killed and killers, a language to be coaxed out of poets— possibly, an intolerable language that will frighten—to which you are not used. We must make it easy for you, feed it to you slowly until you let down the barriers, relax before it. But it’s easy if you will allow me to proceed, it can make transformations, give it leave to do its work in you. Accept the convention as you would opera, provisionally; let me go ahead. Wait to see if the revelation happen. It may not. Or it may come and go, small bits at a time. But even the chips of it are invaluable. Wait to learn the hang of its persuasions as it makes its transformations from the common to the undisclosed and lays that open where—you will see a frightened face! But believe! that poetry will be in the terms you know, insist on that and can and must break through everything, all the outward forms, to re-dress itself humbly in that which you yourself will say is the truth, the exceptional truth of ordinary people, the extraordinary truth. You shall see. It isn’t masculine more than it is feminine, it’s not a book more than it is speech; inside the mind, natural to the mind as metals are to rock, a gist, puppets which if they present distinction it is from that hidden dignity which they, by your leave, reflect from you who are the play. This is a play of a husband and a wife. As you love your husband or your wife or if you hate him or if you hate her, watch the language! see if you think that it expresses something of the things, to your knowledge, that take place in the mind and in the world but seldom on the lips. This play is of a woman and her lover, all mixed up, of life and death and all the secret language that runs through those curious transactions, seldom heard but in the deadest presentations now respectfully unnaturalized. For pleasure! pleasure, not for cruelty but to make you laugh, until you cry like General Washington at the river. Seeing the travellers bathing there who had had their clothes stolen, how he laughed! And how you shall laugh to see yourselves all naked, on the stage! _=Burning the Christmas Greens=_ Their time past, pulled down cracked and flung to the fire —go up in a roar All recognition lost, burnt clean clean in the flame, the green dispersed, a living red, flame red, red as blood wakes on the ash— and ebbs to a steady burning the rekindled bed become a landscape of flame At the winter’s midnight we went to the trees, the coarse holly, the balsam and the hemlock for their green At the thick of the dark the moment of the cold’s deepest plunge we brought branches cut from the green trees to fill our need, and over doorways, about paper Christmas bells covered with tinfoil and fastened by red ribbons we stuck the green prongs in the windows hung woven wreaths and above pictures the living green. On the mantle we built a green forest and among those hemlock sprays put a herd of small white deer as if they were walking there. All this! and it seemed gentle and good to us. Their time past, relief! The room bare. We stuffed the dead grate with them upon the half burnt out log’s smoldering eye, opening red and closing under them and we stood there looking down. Green is a solace a promise of peace, a fort against the cold (though we did not say so) a challenge above the snow’s hard shell. Green (we might have said) that, where small birds hide and dodge and lift their plaintive rallying cries, blocks for them and knocks down the unseeing bullets of the storm. Green spruce boughs pulled down by a weight of snow—Transformed! Violence leaped and appeared. Recreant! roared to life as the flame rose through and our eyes recoiled from it. In the jagged flames green to red, instant and alive. Green! those sure abutments . . . Gone! lost to mind and quick in the contracting tunnel of the grate appeared a world! Black mountains, black and red—as yet uncolored—and ash white, an infant landscape of shimmering ash and flame and we, in that instant, lost, breathless to be witnesses, as if we stood ourselves refreshed among the shining fauna of that fire. _=In Chains=_ When blackguards and murderers under cover of their offices accuse the world of those villainies which they themselves invent to torture it—we have no choice but to bend to their designs, buck them or be trampled while our thoughts gnaw, snap and bite within us helplessly—unless we learn from that to avoid being as they are, how love will rise out of its ashes if we water it, tie up the slender stem and keep the image of its lively flower chiseled upon our minds. _=In Sisterly Fashion=_ The ugly woman clutched her lover round the neck her skin was white as snow as she wept softly to herself knowing her lack of beauty like the sting of death— by which she praised in sisterly fashion your fitted limbs your honied breath _=The World Narrowed to a Point=_ Liquor and love when the mind is dull focus the wit on a world of form The eye awakes perfumes are defined inflections ride the quick ear Liquor and love rescue the cloudy sense banish its despair give it a home. _=The Observer=_ What a scurvy mind whose constant death still simulates the forms of breath— unable or unwilling to own the common things which we must do to live again and be in love and all its quickening pleasures prove— _=A Flowing River=_ You are lovely as a river under tranquil skies— There are imperfections but a music overlays them— telling by how dark a bed the current moves to what sea that shines and ripples in my thought _=The Hounded Lovers=_ Where shall we go? Where shall we go who are in love? Juliet went to Friar Laurence’s cell but we have no rest— Rainwater lies on the hard ground reflecting the morning sky But where shall we go? We cannot resolve ourselves into a dew nor sink into the earth. Shall we postpone it to Eternity? The dry heads of the goldenrod turned to stiff ghosts jerk at their stalks signaling grave warning. Where shall we go? The movement of benediction does not turn back the cold wind. _=The Cure=_ Sometimes I envy others, fear them a little too, if they write well. For when I cannot write I’m a sick man and want to die. The cause is plain. But they have no access to my sources. Let them write then as they may and perfect it as they can they will never come to the secret off that form interknit with the unfathomable ground where we walk daily and from which among the rest you have sprung and opened flower-like to my hand. _=To All Gentleness=_ Like a cylindrical tank fresh silvered upended on the sidewalk to advertise some plumber’s shop, a profusion of pink roses bending ragged in the rain— speaks to me of all gentleness and its enduring. Secure in the enclosing rain, a column of tears borne up by the heavy flowers: the new and the unlikely, bound indissolubly together in one mastery. Out of fear lest the flower be broken the rose puts out its thorns. That is the natural way. We witless, wistful of the flower, unable still by heavy emphasis to praise enough its silence, inventors of opera as national background; the classic tradition, bellowing masks, long since decayed, in our time also perishes. And they speak, euphemistically, of the anti-poetic! Garbage. Half the world ignored . . . Is this praise of gentleness? The lion according to old paintings will lie down with the lamb. But what is meant has not been precisely enough stated: missed or—postponed. The arrow! That the arrow fly! Forthwith she holds it to the string, the hygienic arrow! that, crescent, she may achieve poise, win perhaps a prize later at the meet or making a profession of it grow to be a teacher of the art —and the innocent shaft, released, plunges forward . . . The courts are overcrowded, fear obsesses all intimacies unless legalized—and money, articulated to government mounts still as wonder in the minds of the speculators, to buy (the ferment wedging their skulls ever wider) to buy, shall we say, the grass, or a small cloud perhaps (in whose shadow a lifting wind whirls) or if Queen Blanche, a pond of waterlilies or the rain itself. The natural way, to buy! —to buy off. But if the wing of a plane in combat, coming down, an uncertain landing, if by the shattering prop of a plane he is knocked into the sea, gives himself up injured for lost and then— his wound eased by the seawater—goes on out of habit, swims alone among the enquiring waves twelve hours, fourteen hours. . . . picked up and returned to this life. That too is the natural way, by claw and law— To which we are opposed! For most fear gentleness and misinterpret it, which if by chance they meet the longer arc, upgrade or downgrade, the wash and swing, they are discomfited— A matter of indifference— the wave rising or the wave curving to the hollow: Swam hour after hour, the healthy life he’d lead formerly at Seattle holding him . . . Or was it? Who can tell? come back for all that a month later when they’d released him held incommunicado at the hospital, to say, Here I am, as I promised! Copernicus, Shostakowitch. Is it the occasion or the man? Take an apple and split it between the thumbs. Which is which? Caught in the shuffling of the wider undulations one is brought down, another lifted by the wash; a rush of algae proliferant or a mammoth caught in the ice hair and all for dogs later to dig and devour . . . the phase, is supreme! except for gentleness that joins our lives in one. But shoot! shoot straight, they say. The arrow flies! the barb is driven home and . . . strength thrust upon weakness, the convulsive ecstasy achieved, in the moment of impact we are left deafened and blinded, blind to the sun and moon, the brilliant moonlight leaves, to fish and fowl: the bird in white above the swimming bird and from the depths of the wood the song that is the bird, unseen. The bomb-sight adjusted destruction hangs by a hair over the cities. Bombs away! and the packed word descends—and rightly so. The arrow! the arrow! Only . . . that is . . . the moment is lost! without us, the completion, the learned moment. The gates opened, it also falls away, unrecognized! It is, yes Jakus, the prize, the prize! in which that which has been held from you, my perky lad, is hid. The flower is our sign. Milkweed, a single stalk on the bare embankment (and where does the imagination begin? Violence and gentleness, which is the core? Is gentleness the core?) Slender green reaching up from sand and rubble (the anti-poetic they say ignorantly, a disassociation) premising the flower, without which, no flower. She was forewoman to a gang at the ship foundry, cleared the finished parts to the loading platform; had three misses, all boys, by the man she lives with— and may the fourth be a boy also for which he married her. Tough, huh? Never had a backache. Not the girth of thigh, but that gentleness that harbors all violence, the valid juxtaposition, one by the other, alternates, the cosine, the cylinder and the rose. _=Three Sonnets=_ 1 As the eye lifts, the field is moving—the river, slowly between the stones steadily under the bare branches, heavy slabs close packed with jagged rim-cupped edges, seaward— what was the mudbank crowded, sparkling with diamonds big as fists, unbelievable to witness 2 The silent and snowy mountains do not change their poise—the broken line, the mass whose darkness meets the rising sun, waken uncompromised above the gulls upon the ice-strewn river. You cannot succor me, you cannot change. I will open my eyes at morning even though their lids be sealed faster by ice than stone! 3 My adored wife, this—in spite of Dr. Kennedy’s remark that the story of the repeated injury would sound bad in a divorce court—the bastard: In the one woman I find all the rest—or nothing and raise them thence and celebrate them there and close their eyes and bury them in her and decorate their graves. Upon her their memory clings, each one distinct, enriching her while I yet live to enjoy, perhaps. _=St. Valentine=_ A woman’s breasts for beauty A man’s delights for charm The rod and cups of duty to stave us from harm! A woman’s eyes a woman’s thighs and a man’s straight look: Cities rotted to pig-sties will stand up by that book! _=The Young Cat and the Chrysanthemums=_ You mince, you start advancing indirectly— your tail upright knocking about among the frail, heavily flowered sprays. Yes, you are lovely with your ingratiating manners, sleek sides and small white paws but I wish you had not come here. _=The Poem=_ It’s all in the sound. A song. Seldom a song. It should be a song—made of particulars, wasps, a gentian—something immediate, open scissors, a lady’s eyes—waking centrifugal, centripetal _=Rumba! Rumba!=_ No, not the downfall of the Western World but the wish for its downfall in an idiot mind— Dance, Baby, dance! thence springs the conflict, that it may crash hereafter; not submit and end in a burst of laughter— Cha cha, chacha, cha! to hide the defect— the difficultly held burden, to perfect! melted in a wish to die. Dance, Baby, dance the Cuban Rumba! _=A Plea for Mercy=_ Who hasn’t been frustrated with the eternal virgin shining before him and he cold as a stone? _=Figueras Castle=_ Nine truckloads of jewels while the people starved Nine truckloads in the mud And the people’s enemies coming fast. Stick ’em in your pockets the General said, They’re yours, by God and check them in for the people at the Consulate in Perpignan. But some of them didn’t bother—like those who had stolen them first and were not arrested for it as these were in their need, not held for it as these were in their dire need. _=Eternity=_ She had come, like the river from up country and had work now in town— When? Tonight. The street was dark, she late. Two young rips had cavorted down the hill in the silence, jabbering. Then he heard the click of her heels—at his age! and the darkness grew milky away above him and seemed to move, coming down. She appeared bare headed, in pearl earrings and a cloak. Where shall we go? The boy friend was expecting me it was hard to get away. Where are you supposed to be? Night, greater than the cataract surged in the cisterns of Noah’s chest, enormous night that makes of light a fruit, everywhere active in the dark. Olympia would be expecting him, he swam from her zig-zag through the dark— half things bulging and rotted out, hanging, standing at false angles, abandoned! drove thence close to two hundred miles filling the tank once near midnight, To the left, at the second car tracks, brother. And the stars performed their stated miracles. The wind rose and howled toward 3 A.M. with a dash of rain turning warm. Swift or slow from capsule to capsule of the light he saw between the stars the sky! velvet, like a leaf, in detail and counting at random there, continued, later halting under a street lamp to make some notes. Olympia, her face drawn but relieved said nothing. Breakfast at seven. _=The Hard Listener=_ The powerless emperor makes himself dull writing poems in a garden while his armies kill and burn. But we, in poverty lacking love, keep some relation to the truth of man’s infelicity: say the late flowers, unspoiled by insects and waiting only for the cold. _=The Controversy=_ What do you know about it? the Architect said. The Executive asked me, What the hell do you know about business? Is it so arcane? I can read, I said. Isn’t it just to put 4 and take away 5? From whom? Isn’t that all there is to it? Whom can you best belabor? And do I have to read the whole _Apologia_ to make up my mind touching Newman’s undecorated place in the world? Who? they both said,—the situation and its effects? It’s because of unrelated statements such as that that I have come to have no respect for what you say, one of them looked at me and said. The Jews. Oh the Jews, the Jews! Is Stinkeroo Mormun a Jew? If not then the world is safe (from the Jews!) I can still read and collate experiences you never dreamed, I answered them. Nuts! they said. Very well. Nuts! and decorated nuts and nuts again, I said, to you, gentlemen. _=Perfection=_ O lovely apple! beautifully and completely rotten, hardly a contour marred— perhaps a little shrivelled at the top but that aside perfect in every detail! O lovely apple! what a deep and suffusing brown mantles that unspoiled surface! No one has moved you since I placed you on the porch rail a month ago to ripen. No one. No one! _=These Purists=_ Lovely! all the essential parts, like an oyster without a shell fresh and sweet tasting, to be swallowed, chewed and swallowed. Or better, a brain without a skull. I remember once a guy in our anatomy class dropped one from the third floor window on an organ grinder in Pine street. _=Fertile=_ You are a typical American woman you think men grow on trees— You want love, only love! rarest of male fruit! Break it open and in the white of the crisp flesh find the symmetrical brown seeds. _=A Vision of Labor: 1931=_ In my head the juxtapositions impossible otherwise to accomplish: two young rubber-booted ditchdiggers beside the bed of the dying bishop— cracking obscene jokes at the expense of the flabby woman in the white bathing suit, the weak breaths of the old man masquerading under the double suck of the mule-pump —by the edge of the sea! the shore exploded away, constructively, the sewer going down six feet inside the seawall along the front of the cottages—not through them unfortunately—a _cloaca maxima_ like the one under the Roman Forum which alone made that possible in that place . . . That’s it! There, there! That’s the answer. The thing to be done: Alone made that possible (before the rest stands) there in that place. The girl lying there supine in the old rowboat reading an adventure magazine and the two guys —six foot three each of them if they were an inch—washing their hip-boots off in the stream jerking from the pump at the finished manhole, washing their hands, their heads and faces, cupping their hands to drink the stuff. Geezus! What the hell kind of water is that to drink? But they probably know what they’re doing —and looking down the bank at her lying flat out there in the heat with her five-and-ten dark glasses on to protect her eyes from the sun’s glare—looking down and smiling over her like insane men. When you’ve been broke and damned near starving for five years you get to look that way, said my cousin who had had a taste of it. You can’t help it. That’s poverty. Both your mind and your body are affected. But they’re just mechanics damn good ones most of them, like anybody else. —the white suit pulled up tight into her crotch the way she was lying there facing them —till they called it off, threw the switch and the pump stopped and the bishop died and—they turned their backs on it, flung their boots over their shoulders and went home. _=The Last Turn=_ Then see it! in distressing detail—from behind a red light at 53d and 8th of a November evening, the jazz of the cross lights echoing the crazy weave of the breaking mind: splash of a half purple, half naked woman’s body whose jeweled guts the cars drag up and down— No house but has its brains blown off by the dark! Nothing recognizable, the whole one jittering direction made of all directions spelling the inexplicable: pigment upon flesh and flesh the pigment the genius of a world, against which rages the fury of our concepts, artless but supreme. _=The End of the Parade=_ The sentence undulates raising no song— It is too old, the words of it are falling apart. Only percussion strokes continue with weakening emphasis what was once cadenced melody full of sweet breath. _=The A, B & C of It=_ a. Love’s very fleas are mine. Enter me, worms and all till I crumble and steam with it, pullulate to be sucked into an orchid. b. But the fleas were too shy didn’t want to offend recoiled from the odors and couldn’t unbend. c. Take me then, Spirit of Loneliness insatiable Spirit of Love and let be—for Time without odor is Time without me. _=The Thoughtful Lover=_ Deny yourself all half things. Have it or leave it. But it will keep—or it is not worth the having. Never start anything you can’t finish— However do not lose faith because you are starved! She loves you she says. Believe it —tomorrow. But today the particulars of poetry that difficult art require your whole attention. _=The Aftermath=_ The Winnah! pure as snow courageous as the wind strong as a tree deceptive as the moon All that is the country fitted into you for you were born there. Now it is rewarding you for the unswerving mind curious as a fox which fox-like escaped breathless to its hole. They say you have grown thinner and that there is a girl now to add to the blue eyed boy. Good! the air of the uplands is stimulating. _=The Storm=_ A perfect rainbow! a wide arc low in the northern sky spans the black lake troubled by little waves over which the sun south of the city shines in coldly from the bare hill supine to the wind which cannot waken anything but drives the smoke from a few lean chimneys streaming violently southward _=The Forgotten City=_ When with my mother I was coming down from the country the day of the hurricane, trees were across the road and small branches kept rattling on the roof of the car There was ten feet or more of water making the parkways impassible with wind bringing more rain in sheets. Brown torrents gushed up through new sluices in the valley floor so that I had to take what road I could find bearing to the south and west, to get back to the city. I passed through extraordinary places, as vivid as any I ever saw where the storm had broken the barrier and let through a strange commonplace: Long, deserted avenues with unrecognized names at the corners and drunken looking people with completely foreign manners. Monuments, institutions and in one place a large body of water startled me with an acre or more of hot jets spouting up symmetrically over it. Parks. I had no idea where I was and promised myself I would some day go back to study this curious and industrious people who lived in these apartments, at these sharp corners and turns of intersecting avenues with so little apparent communication with an outside world. How did they get cut off this way from representation in our newspapers and other means of publicity when so near the metropolis, so closely surrounded by the familiar and the famous? _=The Yellow Chimney=_ There is a plume of fleshpale smoke upon the blue sky. The silver rings that strap the yellow brick stack at wide intervals shine in this amber light—not of the sun not of the pale sun but his born brother the declining season _=The Bare Tree=_ The bare cherry tree higher than the roof last year produced abundant fruit. But how speak of fruit confronted by that skeleton? Though live it may be there is no fruit on it. Therefore chop it down and use the wood against this biting cold. _=Raleigh Was Right=_ We cannot go to the country for the country will bring us no peace What can the small violets tell us that grow on furry stems in the long grass among lance shaped leaves? Though you praise us and call to mind the poets who sung of our loveliness it was long ago! long ago! when country people would plow and sow with flowering minds and pockets at ease— if ever this were true. Not now. Love itself a flower with roots in a parched ground. Empty pockets make empty heads. Cure it if you can but do not believe that we can live today in the country for the country will bring us no peace. _=The Monstrous Marriage=_ She who with innocent and tender hands reached up to take the wounded pigeon from the branch, found it turn into a fury as it bled. Maddened she clung to it stabbed by its pain and the blood of her hands and the bird’s blood mingled while she stilled it for the moment and wrapped it in her thought’s clean white handkerchief. After that she adopted a hawk’s life as her own. For it looked up and said, You are my wife for this. Then she released him. But he came back shortly. Certainly, since we are married, she said to him, no one will accept it. Time passed. I try to imitate you, he said while she cried a little in smiling. Mostly, he confided, my head is clouded except for hunting. But for parts of a day it’s clear as any man’s—by your love. No, she would answer him pitifully, what clearer than a hawk’s eye and reasonably the mind also must be so. He turned his head and seeing his profile in her mirror ruffled his feathers and gave a hawk’s cry, desolately. Nestling upon her as was his wont he hid his talons from her soft flesh fluttering his wings against her sides until her mind, always astonished at his assumptions, agonized, heard footsteps and hurried him to the open window whence he made off. After that she had a leather belt made upon which he perched to enjoy her. _=Sometimes It Turns Dry and the Leaves Fall before They Are Beautiful=_ This crystal sphere upon whose edge I drive turns brilliantly— The level river shines! My love! My love! how sadly do we thrive: thistle-caps and sumac or a tree whose sharpened leaves perfect as they are look no farther than— into the grass. _=Sparrows Among Dry leaves=_ The sparrows by the iron fence post— hardly seen for the dry leaves that half cover them— stirring up the leaves, fight and chirp stridently, search and peck the sharp gravel to good digestion and love’s obscure and insatiable appetite. _=Prelude to Winter=_ The moth under the eaves with wings like the bark of a tree, lies symmetrically still— And love is a curious soft-winged thing unmoving under the eaves when the leaves fall. _=Silence=_ Under a low sky— this quiet morning of red and yellow leaves— a bird disturbs no more than one twig of the green leaved peach tree _=Another Year=_ In the rose garden in the park let us learn how little there is to fear from the competition of conflicting seasons— and avoid comparisons, alone in that still place. The slender quietness of the old bushes is of a virtue all its own . . . _=A Cold Front=_ This woman with a dead face has seven foster children and a new baby of her own in spite of that. She wants pills for an abortion and says, Uh hum, in reply to me while her blanketed infant makes unrelated grunts of salutation. She looks at me with her mouth open and blinks her expressionless carved eyes, like a cat on a limb too tired to go higher from its tormentors. And still the baby chortles in its spit and there is a dull flush almost of beauty to the woman’s face as she says, looking at me quietly, I won’t have any more. In a case like this I know quick action is the main thing. _=Against the Sky=_ Let me not forget at least, after the three day rain, beaks raised aface, the two starlings at and near the top twig of the white-oak, dwarfing the barn, completing the minute green of the sculptured foliage, their bullet heads bent back, their horny lips chattering to the morning sun! Praise! while the wraithlike warblers, all but unseen in looping flight dart from pine to spruce, spruce to pine southward. Southward! where new mating warms the wit and cold does not strike, for respite. _=An Address=_ Walk softly on my grave for I desired you, a matter for sorrow for decay; flowers without odor garlanded about the sad legend: Live in this whom green youth denied. _=The Gentle Rejoinder=_ These are the days I want to give up my job and join the old men I once saw on the wharf at Villefranche fishing for sea-snails, with a split stick, in the shallow water— I know something else you could catch, she said, in the spring as easily, if you wanted to. But you probably don’t want to, do you? _=To Ford Madox Ford in Heaven=_ Is it any better in Heaven, my friend Ford, than you found it in Provençe? A heavenly man you seem to me now, never having been for me a saintly one. It lived about you, a certain grossness that was not like the world. The world is cleanly, polished and well made but heavenly man is filthy with his flesh and corrupt that loves to eat and drink and whore— to laugh at himself and not be afraid of himself knowing well he has no possessions and opinions that are worth caring a broker’s word about and that all he is, but one thing, he feeds as one will feed a pet dog. So roust and love and dredge the belly full In Heaven’s name! I laugh to think of you wheezing in Heaven. Where is Heaven? But why do I ask that, since you showed the way? I don’t care a damn for it other than for that better part lives beside me here so long as I live and remember you. Thank God you were not delicate, you let the world in and lied! damn it you lied grossly sometimes. But it was all, I see now, a carelessness, the part of a man that is homeless here on earth. Provençe, the fat assed Ford will never again strain the chairs of your cafés pull and pare for his dish your sacred garlic, grunt and sweat and lick his lips. Gross as the world he has left to us he has become a part of that of which you were the known part, Provençe, he loved so well. _=The Clouds=_ _=Aigeltinger=_ In the bare trees old husks make new designs Love moves the crows before the dawn The cherry-sun ushers in the new phase The radiant mind addressed by tufts of flocking pear blossoms proposes new profundities to the soul Deftness stirs in the cells of Aigeltinger’s brain which flares like ribbons round an electric fan This is impressive, he will soon proclaim God! And round and round, the winds and underfoot, the grass the rose-cane leaves and blackberries and Jim will read the encyclopedia to his new bride—gradually Aigeltinger you have stuck in my conk illuminating, for nearly half a century I could never beat you at your specialty Nothing has ever beaten a mathematician but yeast The cloudless sky takes the sun in its periphery and slides its disc across the blue They say I’m not profound But where is profundity, Aigeltinger mathematical genius dragged drunk from some cheap bar to serve their petty purposes? Aigeltinger, you were profound _=Franklin Square=_ Instead of the flower of the hawthorn the spine: The tree is in bloom the flowers and the leaves together sheltering the noisy sparrows that give by their intimate indifference, the squirrels and pigeons on the sharp- edged lawns—the figure of a park: A city, a decadence of bounty— a tall negress approaching the bench pursing her old mouth for what coin? _=Labrador=_ How clean these shallows how firm these rocks stand about which wash the waters of the world It is ice to this body that unclothes its pallors to thoughts of an immeasurable sea, unmarred, that as it lifts encloses this straining mind, these limbs in a single gesture. _=The Apparition=_ My greetings to you, sir, whose memory, the striped coat and colors— What is one man? a man remembered still in the jacket of his success? of the winning club? in himself—successful? one man, alone? This is that he who slights his fellows— or else, as he is, plunges to the wind-whipped swirl, hat, coat, shoes and—as you did—drags in the body to the grapples defying death and the sea. Not once but—again! Is this the war—that spawned you? Or did you make the war? Whichever, there you are. _=The Light Shall Not Enter=_ It is in the minds of the righteous that death crows loudest. Death! the cry is. Death! in the teeth of the sky, as though fire is not to blast and the copper of desire burnish under it. Oh we choose our words too carefully to fit a calcined skeleton of meaning, in which lives! lives only resent- ment. We the flame and furnace talk, embittered as though ours were some other destiny whose entrails are not to burn—shall escape the heat. Pah! _=A Woman in Front of a Bank=_ The bank is a matter of columns, like . convention, unlike invention; but the pediments sit there in the sun to convince the doubting of investments “solid as rock”—upon which the world stands, the world of finance, the only world: Just there, talking with another woman while rocking a baby carriage back and forth stands a woman in a pink cotton dress, bare legged and headed whose legs are two columns to hold up her face, like Lenin’s (her loosely arranged hair profusely blond) or Darwin’s and there you have it: a woman in front of a bank. _=The Night Rider=_ Scoured like a conch or the moon’s shell I ride from my love through the damp night. there are lights through the trees, falling leaves, the air and the blood an even mood warm with summer dwindling, relic of heat: Ruin dearly bought smoothed to a round carved by the sand the pulse a remembered pulse of full-tide gone _=Chanson=_ This woman! how shall I describe her who is wealthly in the riches of her sex? No counterfeit, no mere metal to be sure— yet, a treasury, a sort of lien upon all property we list and transfer. This woman has no need to play the market or to do anything more than watch the moon. For to her, thoughts are not like those of the philosopher or scientist, or clever playwright. Her thoughts are to her like fruit to the tree, the apple, pear. She thinks and thinks well, but to different purpose than a man, and I discover there a novel territory. It is a world to make the world little worth travelling by ship or air. Moscow, Zanzibar, the Ægean Islands, the Crimea she surpasses by that which by her very being she would infer, a New World welcome as to a sailor and habitable so that I am willing to stay there. _=The Birdsong=_ Disturb the balance, broken bird the distress of the song cuts through an ample silence sweeping the trees. It is the trouble of the brook that makes it loud, the current broke to give out a burbling breaks the arched stillness, ripples the tall grass gone to heady seed, bows the heads of goldenrod that bear a vulgar happiness, the bay-berry, briars— break also your happiness for me. _=To a Lovely Old Bitch=_ Sappho, Sappho, Sappho! initiate, handmaiden, to Astarte, you praised delicate flowers and likened them to virgins of your acquaintance. Let them grow, thank God! outside the cemetery barrier: —burials for cash, the shares ample security against—? The butterfly, The Painted Admiral, on a milkweed cluster, untrampled, keep you company and pale blue chickory, frilled petals —butter-and-eggs, lady’s-slipper, close beside the rust of the dump-heap —rust, broken fruit-baskets and bits of plaster, painted on one side, from dismantled bedrooms. _=The Bitter World of Spring=_ On a wet pavement the white sky recedes mottled black by the inverted pillars of the red elms, in perspective, that lift the tangled net of their desires hard into the falling rain. And brown smoke is driven down, running like water over the roof of the bridge- keeper’s cubicle. And, as usual, the fight as to the nature of poetry —Shall the philosophers capture it?— is on. And, casting an eye down into the water, there, announced by the silence of a white bush in flower, close under the bridge, the shad ascend, midway between the surface and the mud, and you can see their bodies red-finned in the dark water headed, unrelenting, upstream. _=Lament=_ What face, in the water, distinct yet washed by an obscurity? The willow supplants its own struggling rafters (of winter branches) by a green radiance. Is it old or young? But what this face reflected beyond the bare structures of a face shining from the creaseless water? A face overlaid with evil, brown water; the good insecure, the evil sure beyond the buried sun. Lift it. Turn away. There was beside you but now another face, with long nose and clear blue eyes, secure . . . _=A History of Love=_ 1 And would you gather turds for your grandmother’s garden? Out with you then, dustpan and broom; she has seen the horse passing! Out you go, bold again as you promise always to be. Stick your tongue out at the neighbors that her flowers may grow. 2 Let me stress your loveliness and its gravity its counter-hell: Reading finds you on the page where sight enlarges to confound the mind and only a child is frightened by its father’s headgear while a bird jigs and ol’ Bunk Johnson blows his horn. 3 With the mind and with the hand, by moral turn and prestidigitation fan the smouldering flame of love which in the dull coals is all but gone. Between one and the other transpose wrong and rouse the banished smile that used to spring at once at meeting! Rewaken love, again, again! to warm the chilly heart and bring fresh flowers. For flowers are not, as we are not of that stuff whence we both are got. _=When Structure Fails Rhyme Attempts to Come to the Rescue=_ The old horse dies slow. By gradual degrees the fervor of his veins matches the leaves’ stretch, day by day. But the pace that his mind keeps is the pace of his dreams. He does what he can, with unabated phlegm, ahem! but the pace that his flesh keeps— leaning, leaning upon the bars—beggars by far all pace and every refuge of his dreams. _=Education a Failure=_ The minor stupidities of my world dominate that world— as when with two bridges across the river and one closed for repairs the other also will be closed by the authorities for painting! But then there is heaven and the ideal state closed also before the aspiring soul. I had rather watch a cat threading a hedge with another sitting by while the bird screams overhead athrash in the cover of the low branches. _=The Banner Bearer=_ In the rain, the lonesome dog idiosyn- cratically, with each quadribeat, throws out the left fore- foot beyond the right intent, in his stride, on some obscure insistence—from bridge- ward going into new territory. _=The Goat=_ Having in the mind thought to have died, to that celebrant among trees, aging (with the season) foreign to sight— in a field a goat, befouled, shagbellied, indifferent to the mind’s ecstasies, flutters its blunt tail and turns a vacant face lop-eared, sleepy-eyed to stare, unblinking, meditant— listless in its assured sanctity. _=Two Deliberate Exercises=_ I. LESSON FROM A PUPIL RECITAL (_for Agnes_) In a fourfold silence the music struggles for mastery and the mind from its silence, fatefully assured, wakens to the music: Unnamed, without age, sex or pretence of accomplishment—their faces blank, they rise and move to the platform unannounced and the music leads them—the racially stigmaed, the gross bodied, all feet—cleansing from each his awkwardness for him to blossom thence a sound pleading, pleading for pleasure, pleasure! at the tunnel of the ear. And love, who hides from public places, moves in his bed of air, of flowers, of ducks, of sheep and locust trees in bloom—the white, sweet locust—to fade again at the sounds into impossibilities and thunderstorms. There remains the good teacher blinking from his dream before the hand-shakes of his constituents. 2. VOYAGES In the center, above the basin, the mirror. To the left of it the Maxfield Parrish, Ulysses at Sea, his small ship coming fog-threatened from between Scylla and Charybdis. And to the right the girl of nine, play-pail in hand, bareheaded upon a dune-crest facing the shining waters. There you have it, unexcelled as feeling. What of it? Well, we live among the birds and bees in vain unless there result—now or then— a presentation to which these two presentations serve as humble stopgaps—to invoke for us a whole realm, compact of inverted nature, straining within the imprisoned mind to free us. Well, to free us. At which, seeing in the pasture horses among the brambles, hearing the wind sigh, we broach the chaos—unless Valéry be mistaken—of the technical where stand waiting for us or nowhere the tree- lined avenues of our desires. _=The Mirrors=_ Is Germany’s bestiality, in detail like certain racial traits, any more than a reflection of the world’s evil? Take a negative, take Ezra Pound for example, and see how the world has impressed itself there. It is as when with infra-red searching a landscape obscured to the unaided eye one discloses the sea. The world is at its worst the positive to these foils, imaged there as on the eyes of a fly. _=His Daughter=_ Her jaw wagging her left hand pointing stiff armed behind her, I noticed: her youth, her receding chin and fair hair; her legs, bare The sun was on her as she came to the step’s edge, the fat man, caught in his stride, collarless, turned sweating toward her. _=Design for November=_ Let confusion be the design and all my thoughts go, swallowed by desire: recess from promises in the November of your arms. Release from the rose: broken reeds, strawpale, through which, from easy branches that mock the blood a few leaves fall. There the mind is cradled, stripped also and returned to the ground, a trivial and momentary clatter. Sleep and be brought down and so condone the world, eased of the jagged sky and all its petty imageries, flying birds, its fogs and windy phalanxes . . . _=The Manoeuvre=_ I saw the two starlings coming in toward the wires. But at the last, just before alighting, they turned in the air together and landed backwards! that’s what got me—to face into the wind’s teeth. _=The Horse=_ The horse moves independently without reference to his load He has eyes like a woman and turns them about, throws back his ears and is generally conscious of the world. Yet he pulls when he must and pulls well, blowing fog from his nostrils like fumes from the twin exhausts of a car. _=Hard Times=_ Stone steps, a solid block too tough to be pried out, from which the house, rather, has been avulsed leaving a pedestal, on which a fat boy in an old overcoat, a butt between his thick lips, the coat pushed back, stands kidding, Parking Space! three steps up from his less lucky fellows. _=The Dish of Fruit=_ The table describes nothing: four legs, by which it becomes a table. Four lines by which it becomes a quatrain, the poem that lifts the dish of fruit, if we say it is like a table—how will it describe the contents of the poem? _=The Motor-Barge=_ The motor-barge is at the bridge the air lead the broken ice unmoving. A gull, the eternal gull, flies as always, eyes alert beak pointing to the life-giving water. Time falters but for the broad river- craft which low in the water moves grad- ually, edging between the smeared bulkheads, churning a mild wake, laboring to push past the constriction with its heavy load _=Russia=_ The Williams Avenue Zionist Church (colored) a thing to hold in the palm of the hand, your big hand— the dwarf campanile piled up, improvised of blue cinder-blocks, badly aligned (except for the incentive) unvarnished, the cross at the top slapped together (in this lumber shortage) of sticks from an old barrel top, I think —painted white Russia, idiot of the world, blind idiot —do you understand me? This also I place in your hands . . . I dream! and my dream is folly. While armies rush to the encounter I, alone, dream before the impending onslaught. And the power in me, to be crushed out: this paper, forgotten —not even known ever to have existed, proclaims the power of my dream . . . Folly! I call upon folly to save us— and scandal and disapproval, the restless angels of the mind— (I omit the silly word exile. For from what and to what land shall I be exiled and talk of the cardinal bird and the starling as though they were strange?) I am at home in my dream, Russia; and only there, before the obliterating blow that shall flatten everything and its crazy masonry, am I at home. Inspired by my dream I do not call upon a party to save me, nor a government of whatever sort. Rather I descend into my dream as into a quiet lake and there, already there, I find my kinships, Thence I rise by my own propulsions into a world beyond the moon. O Russia, Russia! must we begin to call you idiot of the world? When you were a dream the world lived in you inviolate— O Russia! Russians! come with me into my dream and let us be lovers, connoisseurs, idlers—Come with me in the sprit of Walt Whitman’s earliest poem, let us loaf at our ease—a moment at the edge of destruction Look. Look through my eyes a moment. I am a poet, uninfluential, with no skill in polemics—my friends tell me I lack the intellect. Look, I once met Mayakovsky. Remember Mayakovsky? I have a little paper-bound volume of his in my attic, inscribed by him in his scrawling hand to our mutual friendship. He put one foot up on the table that night at 14th St. when he read to us—and his voice came like the outpourings of the Odyssey. Russians! let Mayakovsky be my sponsor—he and his Willie, the Havana street-cleaner— Mayakovsky was a good guy and killed himself, I suppose, not to embarrass you. And so I go about. And now I want to call your attention— that you may know what keen eyes I have in my dream— to Leonardo’s Last Supper! a small print I saw today in a poor kitchen. Russia! for the first time in my life, I noticed this famous picture not because of the subject matter but because of the severity and simplicity of the background! Oh there was the passion of the scene, of course, generally. But particularly, ignoring the subject, I fell upon the perpendiculars of the paneled woodwork standing there, submissive, in exaggerated perspective. There you have it. It’s that background from which my dreams have sprung. These I dedicate now to you, now when I am about to die. I hold back nothing. I lay my spirit at your feet and say to you: Here I am, a dreamer. I do not resist you. Among many others, undistinguished, of no moment—I am the background upon which you will build your empire. _=The Act=_ There were the roses, in the rain. Don’t cut them, I pleaded. They won’t last, she said But they’re so beautiful where they are. Agh, we were all beautiful once, she said, and cut them and gave them to me in my hand. _=The Savage Beast=_ As I leaned to retrieve my property he leaped with all his weight so that I felt the wind of his jaws as his teeth gnashed before my mouth. Isn’t he awful! said the woman, his collar straining under her clutch. Yes, I replied drily wanting to eviscerate the thing there, scoop out his brains and eat them—and hers too! Until it flashed on me, How many, like this dog, could I not wish had been here in my place, only a little closer! _=The Well Disciplined Bargeman=_ The shadow does not move. It is the water moves, running out. A monolith of sand on a passing barge, riding the swift water, makes that its fellow. Standing upon the load the well disciplined bargeman rakes it carefully, smooth on top with nicely squared edges to conform to the barge outlines—ritually: sand. All about him the silver water, fish-swift, races under the Presence. Whatever there is else is moving. The restless gulls, unlike companionable pigeons, taking their cue from the ruffled water, dip and circle avidly into the gale. Only the bargeman raking upon his barge remains, like the shadow, sleeping _=Raindrops on a Briar=_ I, a writer, at one time hipped on painting, did not consider the effects, painting, for that reason, static, on the contrary the stillness of the objects—the flowers, the gloves— freed them precisely by that from a necessity merely to move in space as if they had been— not children! but the thinking male or the charged and deliver- ing female frantic with ecstasies; served rather to present, for me, a more pregnant motion: a series of varying leaves clinging still, let us say, to the cat-briar after last night’s storm, its waterdrops ranged upon the arching stems irregularly as an accompaniment. _=Suzanne=_ Brother Paul! look! —but he rushes to a different window. The moon! I heard shrieks and thought: What’s that? That’s just Suzanne talking to the moon! Pounding on the window with both fists: Paul! Paul! —and talking to the moon. Shrieking and pounding the glass with both fists! Brother Paul! the moon! _=Navajo=_ Red woman, (Keep Christ out of this—and his mountains: Sangre de Cristo red rocks that make the water run blood-red) squaw in red red woman walking the desert I suspected I should remember you this way: walking the brain eyes cast down to escape ME! with fixed sight stalking the grey brush paralleling the highway . . . —head mobbled red, red to the ground— sweeping the ground— the blood walking erect, the desert animating the blood to walk erect by choice through the pale green of the starveling sage _=Graph=_ There was another, too a half-breed Cherokee tried to thumb a ride out of Tulsa, standing there with a bunch of wildflowers in her left hand pressed close just below the belly _=The Testament of Perpetual Change=_ _Mortal Prudence, handmaid of divine Providence_ Walgreen carries Culture to the West: _hath inscrutable reckoning with Fate and Fortune:_ At Cortez, Colorado the Indian prices _We sail a changeful sea through halcyon days and storm,_ a bottle of cheap perfume, furtively— _and when the ship laboreth, our stedfast purpose_ but doesn’t buy, while under my hotel window _trembles like as a compass in a binnacle._ a Radiance Rose spreads its shell—thin _Our stability is but balance, and wisdom lies_ petals above the non-irrigated garden _in masterful administration of the unforeseen_ among the unprotected desert foliage. _’Twas late in my long journey when I had clomb to where_ Having returned from Mesa Verde, the ruins _the path was narrowing and the company few_ of the Cliff Dwellers’ palaces still in possession of my mind _=The Flower=_ This too I love Flossie sitting in the sun on its cane the first rose yellow as an egg the pet canary in his cage beside her carolling _=For a Low Voice=_ If you ignore the possibilities of art, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, &c. you are likely to become involved, huh! in extreme, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh &c. difficulties. For instance, when they started to make a park at the site of the old Dutch, huh, huh, huh! cemetery, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, &c. they could not, digging down upon the hoary, heh, heh! graves, find so much as a thighbone, huh, huh, huh! or in fact anything! wha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, &c. to remove! This, according to the requirements of the case, created a huh, huh, huh, huh shall we say, dilemma? So that, to make a gesture, for old time’s sake, heh, heh! of filling the one vault retained as communal repository huh, huh! and monument, they had to throw in SOMETHING! presumed to be bones but observed by those nearest, heh, heh, heh! more to resemble rotten tree roots than ossa! a low sort of dissembling, ha, ha, ha, &c. on the part of the officials were it not excusable, oh, ho, ho, ho, ho, &c. under the head of . . . Yes, yes, of course! wha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha! Whoh, ho, hee, hee! Rather a triumph of a sort! Whoop la! Whee hee!—don’t you think? _=The Words Lying Idle=_ The fields parched, the leaves drying on the maples, the birds’ beaks gaping! if it would rain, if it would only rain! Clouds come up, move from the west and from the south but they bring no rain. Heat and dry winds —the grass is curled and brittle underfoot, the foot leaves it broken. The roads are dust. But the mind is dust also and the eyes burn from it. They burn more from restless nights, from the full moon shining on a dry earth than from lack of rain. The rain, if it fell, would ease the mind more than the grass, the mind would be somewhat, at least, appeased against this dryness and the death implied. _=Picture of a Nude in a Machine Shop=_ and foundry, (that’s art) a red ostrich plume in her hair: Sweat and muddy water, coiled fuse-strips surround her poised sitting— (between red, parted curtains) the right leg (stockinged) up! beside the point— at ease. Light as a glove, light as her black gloves! Modeled as a shoe, a woman’s high heeled shoe! —the other leg stretched out bare (toward the top— and upward) as the smeared hide under shirt and pants stiff with grease and dirt is bare— approaching the centrum (disguised) the metal to be devalued! —bare as a blow-torch flame, undisguised. _=The Hurricane=_ The tree lay down on the garage roof and stretched, You have your heaven, it said, go to it. _=The Mind’s Games=_ If a man can say of his life or any moment of his life, There is nothing more to be desired! his state becomes like that told in the famous double sonnet—but without the sonnet’s restrictions. Let him go look at the river flowing or the bank of late flowers, there will be one small fly still among the petals in whose gauzy wings raised above its back a rainbow shines. The world to him is radiant and even the fact of poverty is wholly without despair. So it seems until there rouse to him pictures of the systematically starved—for a purpose, at the mind’s proposal. What good then the light winged fly, the flower or the river—too foul to drink of or even to bathe in? The 90 storey building beyond the ocean that a rocket will span for destruction in a matter of minutes but will not bring him, in a century, food or relief of any sort from his suffering. The world too much with us? Rot! the world is not half enough with us— the rot of a potato with a healthy skin, a rot that is never revealed till we are about to eat—and it revolts us. Beauty? Beauty should make us paupers, should blind us, rob us—for it does not feed the sufferer but makes his suffering a fly-blown putrescence and ourselves decay—unless the ecstasy be general. _=The Stylist=_ Long time no see. —a flash as from polished steel, then: I’ve been too damned poor to get out of the woods. I was expecting you to come up and bring me into town. No answer. _=Note to Music: Brahms 1st Piano Concerto=_ Of music, in a cavernous house, we enjoy our humanity the more being by machine, since it is lost, survives, is rekindled only ad interim, pending a willed refusal: the Demuths, the Sheelers, the Hartleys, green and grey; black (the meaning crimson) are moved likewise in us thereby. We falter to assurance in despair hearing the piano pant to the horns’ uncertain blow that octaves sidelong from the deafened windows crescendo, rallentando, diminuendo in wave-like dogmas we no longer will. Let us sob and sonnet our dreams, breathing upon our nails before the savage snow . . . _=The Red-Wing Blackbird=_ The wild red-wing black bird croaks frog like though more shrill as the beads of his eyes blaze over the swamp and the o- dors of the swamp vodka to his nostrils _=A Place (Any Place) to Transcend All Places=_ In New York, it is said, they do meet (if that is what is wanted) talk but nothing is exchanged unless that guff can be retranslated: as to say, that is not the end, there are channels above that, draining places from which New York is dignified, created (the deaf are not tuned in). A church in New Hampshire built by its pastor from his own wood lot. One black (of course, red) rose; a fat old woman backing through a screen door. Two, from the armpits down, contrasting in bed, breathless; a letter from a ship; leaves filling, making, a tree (but wait) not just leaves, leaves of one design that make a certain design, no two alike, not like the locust either, next in line, nor the Rose of Sharon, in the pod-stage, near it—a tree! Imagine it! Pears philosophically hard. Nor thought that is from branches on a root, from an acid soil, with scant grass about the bole where it breaks through. New York is built of such grass and weeds; a modern tuberculin-tested herd white-faced behind a white fence, patient and uniform; a museum of looks across a breakfast table; subways of dreams; towers of divisions from thin pay envelopes. What else is it? And what else can it be? Sweatshops and railroad yards at dusk (puffed up by fantasy to seem real) what else can they be budded on to live a little longer? The eyes by this far quicker than the mind. —and we have : Southern writers, foreign writers, hugging a dis- tinction, while perspectived behind them following the crisis (at home) peasant loyalties inspire the avant-garde. Abstractly? No: That was for something else. “Le futur!” grimly. New York? That hodge- podge? The international city (from the Bosphorus). Poor Hoboken. Poor sad Eliot. Poor memory. —and we have : the memory of Elsa von Freytag Loringhofen, a fixation from the street door of a Berlin playhouse; all who “wear their manner too obviously,” the adopted English (white) and many others. —and we have : the script writer advising “every line to be like a ten word telegram” but neglecting to add, “to a child of twelve”—obscene beyond belief. Obscene and abstract as excrement— that no one wants to own except the coolie with a garden of which the lettuce particularly depends on it—if you like lettuce, but very, very specially, heaped about the roots for nourish- ment. _=The Old House=_ Rescued! new-white (from Time’s dragon: neglect-tastelessness— the down-beat) But why? why the descent into ugliness that intervened, how could it have come about, (the essence— cluttered with weeds, broken gear —in a shoddy neighborhood) something so sound? —that there should have befallen such decay, such decay of the senses— the redundant and expensive, the useless, the useless rhyme? Stasis: a balance of . . . vacuities, seeking . . . to achieve . . . by emphasis! the full sonorities of . . . an evasion! ! —lack of “virtue,” the fake castellation, the sham tower—upon a hidden weakness of trusses, a whole period shot to hell out of disrelatedness to mind, to object association: the years following the Civil War— But four balanced gables, in a good old style, four symmetrical waves, well anchored, turning about the roof’s pivot, simple and direct, how could they not have apprehended it? They could not— Bitter reminder. And then! out of the air, out of decay, out of desire, necessity, through economic press—aftermath of “the bomb”— a Perseus! rescue comes: —the luminous from “sea wrack,” sets it, for itself, a house almost gone, shining again. _=The Thing=_ Each time it rings I think it is for me but it is not for me nor for anyone it merely rings and we serve it bitterly together, they and I _=The Mind Hesitant=_ Sometimes the river becomes a river in the mind or of the mind or in and of the mind Its banks snow the tide falling a dark rim lies between the water and the shore And the mind hesitant regarding the stream senses a likeness which it will find—a complex image: something of white brows bound by a ribbon of sooty thought beyond, yes well beyond the mobile features of swiftly flowing waters, before the tide will change and rise again, maybe _=Tragic Detail=_ The day before I died I noticed the maple tree how its bark curled against the November blaze There was some work to do and three birds stepped awkwardly abreast upon the bare lawn Only the country-woman’s lip soft with down black as her hair was black against the white skin comforted me but the twins and their sister excluded me dragging insistent upon the loose gown. _=Philomena Andronico=_ With the boys busy at ball in the worn lot nearby She stands in the short street reflectively bouncing the red ball Slowly practiced a little awkwardly throwing one leg over (Not as she had done formerly screaming and missing But slowly surely) then pausing throws the ball With a full slow very slow and easy motion following through With a slow half turn— as the ball flies and rolls gently At the child’s feet waiting— and yet he misses it and turns And runs while she slowly regains her former pose Then shoves her fingers up through her loose short hair quickly Draws one stocking tight and waiting tilts Her hips and in the warm still air lets her arms Fall Fall loosely (waiting) at her sides _=The Woodpecker=_ Innocence! Innocence is the condition of heaven. Only in that which we do not yet know shall we be fêted, fed. That is to say, with ceremony. The unknown is our refuge toward which we hurtle. For even tho’, lacking parachute, we be flattened upon the earth it will not be the same earth we left to fly upward. To seek what? There is nothing there. It is not even the unknown for us now. But we never knew the earth so solidly as when we were crushed upon it. From a height we fall, innocent, to our deaths. I’d rather in the November be a woodpecker of the woods. A cry, a movement, red dabbled, among the bare branches. A light, a destination where destinations are endless and the beetle the end of flight. Fed and the ceremony unwitnessed other than by the lichened rocks, the dry leaves and the upright bodies of the trees. It is innocence flings the black and white body through the air, innocence guides him. Flight means only desire and desire the end of flight, stabbing there with a barbed tongue which _succeeds_! _=The Girl=_ with big breasts under a blue sweater bareheaded— crossing the street reading a newspaper stops, turns and looks down as though she had seen a dime on the pavement _=The Clouds=_ I Filling the mind upon the rim of the overarching sky, the horses of the dawn charge from south to north, gigantic beasts rearing flame-edged above the pit, a rank confusion of the imagination still uncured a rule, piebald under the streetlamps, reluctant to be torn from its hold. Their flanks still caught among low, blocking forms their fore-parts rise lucid beyond this smell of a swamp, a mud livid with decay and life! turtles that burrowing among the white roots lift their green red-striped faces startled before the dawn. A black flag, writhing and whipping at the staff-head mounts the sepulcher of the empty bank, fights to be free . . . South to north! the direction unmistakable, they move, distinct beyond the unclear edge of the world, clouds! like statues before which we are drawn—in darkness, thinking of our dead, unable, knowing no place where else rightly to lodge them. Tragic outlines and the bodies of horses, mindfilling—but visible! against the invisible; actual against the imagined and the concocted; unspoiled by hands and unshaped also by them but caressed by sight only, moving among them, not that that propels the eyes from under, while it blinds: —upon whose backs the dead ride, high! undirtied by the putridity we fasten upon them— South to north, for this moment distinct and undeformed, into the no-knowledge of their nameless destiny. II Where are the good minds of past days, the unshorn? Villon, to be sure, with his saw-toothed will and testament? Erasmus who praised folly and Shakespeare who wrote so that no school man or churchman could sanction him without revealing his own imbecility? Aristotle, shrewd and alone, a onetime herb peddler? They all, like Aristophanes, knew the clouds and said next to nothing of the soul’s flight but kept their heads and died— like Socrates, Plato’s better self, unmoved. Where? They live today in their old state because of the pace they kept that keeps them now fresh in our thoughts, their relics, ourselves: Toulouse-Lautrec, the deformed who lived in a brothel and painted the beauty of whores. These were the truth-tellers of whom we are the sole heirs beneath the clouds that bring shadow and darkness full of thought deepened by rain against the clatter of an empty sky. But anything to escape humanity! Now it’s spiritualism—again, as if the certainty of a future life were any solution to our dilemma: how to get published not what we write but what we would write were it not for the laws against libelous truth. The poor brain unwilling to own the obtrusive body would crawl from it like a crab and because it succeeds, at times, in doffing that, by its wiles of drugs or other “ecstasies,” thinks at last that it is quite free—exulted, scurrying to some slightly larger shell some snail has lost (where it will live). And so, thinking, pretends a mystery! an unbodied thing that would still be a brain—but no body, something that does not eat but flies by the propulsions of pure—what? into the sun itself, illimitedly and exists so forever, blest, washed, purged and at ease in non-representational bursts of shapeless flame, sentient (naturally!)—and keeps touch with the earth (by former works) at least. The intellect leads, leads still! Beyond the clouds. III (Scherzo) I came upon a priest once at St. Andrew’s in Amalfi in crimson and gold brocade riding the clouds of his belief. It happened that we tourists had intervened at some mid-moment of the ritual— tipped the sacristan or whatever it was. No one else was there—porphyry and alabaster, the light flooding in scented with sandalwood—but this holy man jiggling upon his buttocks to the litany chanted, in response, by two kneeling altar boys! I was amazed and stared in such manner that he, caught half off the earth in his ecstasy—though without losing a beat— turned and grinned at me from his cloud. IV With each, dies a piece of the old life, which he carries, a precious burden, beyond! Thus each is valued by what he carries and that is his soul— diminishing the bins by that much unless replenished. It is that which is the brotherhood: the old life, treasured. But if they live? What then? The clouds remain —the disordered heavens, ragged, ripped by winds or dormant, a caligraphy of scaly dragons and bright moths, of straining thought, bulbous or smooth, ornate, the flesh itself (in which the poet foretells his own death); convoluted, lunging upon a pismire, a conflagration, a . . . . . . . _=Ballad of Faith=_ _=Ballad of Faith=_ No dignity without chromium No truth but a glossy finish If she purrs she’s virtuous If she hits ninety she’s pure ZZZZZZZZZ! Step on the gas, brother (the horn sounds hoarsely) _=And Who Do You Think “They” Are?=_ The day when the under-cover writings of the Russians are in, that day we’ll have an anthology, all around, to knock their heads off. War will grow sick, puke its guts and if, dog-like, it wants to lick up that, let it (after we have put poison in it) for good and all. _=The Non-Entity=_ The rusty-gold green trees cone-shaped, animadvertent cissiform, cramped —a maple solitary upon the wood’s face. Behind it an ocean roars, rocks the mind, janistically pours autumn, shaking nerves of color over it _=Childe Harold to the Round Tower Came=_ Obviously, in a plutocracy the natural hero is the man who robs a bank Look at him, the direct eyes, the forehead! Clearly he is intelligent—but with humor. Half suppressed it leaps from his eyes crinkling the skin under them. His face has two sides, brows that bespeak courage— directed by research, that purple word of the elite! And love! bulbous (in the lower lip) with desire as in all full blooded creatures at their best, affec- tionate but alas, guarded to survive. To survive is the crown of virtue in this world of finance. He will be groined like a manager, but more humane, the eyes bluer, he will have a more piercing look, greater dash, be more freehanded —the face deeper lined. What _must_ he be who is their master? makes them shake, steel themselves against him at great cost, a whole fleet of armored trucks, in which, snails, oh what poverty of means lies encased there to insure against his bounty . . . _=Io Baccho!=_ God created alcohol and it wasn’t privately for the Russians God created alcohol and it wasn’t for Dr. Goldsmith It was for Mrs. Reiter who is bored with having children though she loves them. God created alcohol to release and engulf us. Shall I say it is the only evidence of God in this environment? Mrs. R. doesn’t drink but I drink and I told the angel, God created alcohol! —if it weren’t for that I’d say there wasn’t Any— thinking of Mrs. R. who is one eighth American Indian and what with the pain in her guts stands like an Indian “If I had the strength” Why should I bother to tell you? God created alcohol Shall I swoon like Mr. Keats? and not from looking at a Grecian urn. God created alcohol to allay us _=The Centenarian=_ I don’t think we shall any of us live as long as has she, we haven’t the steady mind and strong heart— _Wush a deen a daddy O_ _There’s whisky in the jar!_ I wish you could have seen her yesterday with her red cheeks and snow-white hair so cheerful and contented— she was a picture— We sang hymns for her. She couldn’t join us but when we had done she raised her hands and clapped them softly together. Then when I brought her her whisky and water I said to her as we always do— _Wush a deen a daddy O_ _There’s whisky in the jar!_ She couldn’t say the first part but she managed to repeat at the end— _There’s whisky in the jar!_ _=All That Is Perfect in Woman=_ _=All That Is Perfect in Woman=_ The symbol of war, a war fast accomplished flares in all our faces an alcoholic flame— Miami sunlight: the pattern of waves mottled with foam against a blond day! The fish scream in soundless agony trapped by its sulphuric acid— a blow-torch flame at exorbitant cost virginity longing for snow and a quiet life that will (rightly) blossom as a mangled corpse: Our own Joppolo Schmidt the G.I. Joe acted by himself, a pathetic scene laid upon thin slices of sympathy, a snack between halves to rouse a smile. And in our mouths! a foot minus three toes— In our embraces a head partly scorched, hairless and with no nose! Between the thighs a delicious lung with entrails and a tongue or gorget! Blithe spirit! Monody with feces—you must sing of her and behold the overpowering foetor of her girlish breasts and breath: tumbled seas, washing waves, the grave’s grandfather. Let us praise! praise the dreadful symbol of carnivorous sex— The gods live! severally amongst us— This is their familiar! —whose blue eyes and laughing mouth affirm the habeas corpus of our resignation Oh Lorca, Lorca— shining singer if you could have been alive for this! At five in the afternoon. —fecund and jocund are familiar to the sea and what dangles, lacerant, under the belly of the Portuguese Man O’War is also familiar to the sea, familiar to the sea, the sea. _=The Rat=_ _=The Rat=_ The rat sits up and works his moustaches, the ontologic phenomenon of cheese rifting his blood to orgiastic rule. The tail, epicene in its application, the round-file tail, that fearsome appendage which man for all his zest cannot match—other than conceptu- ally, of which his most thought latterly consists. How like this man the rat is in the ubiquity of his deformity: plague infected fleas come, through the connivance of the San Frigando Chamber of Commerce, to infest the very gophers of Nevada. His wise eyes mewing in his spindle head the rat thrives, well suited to a world conditioned to such human “tropism for order” at all cost. _=Jingle=_ There ought to be a wedding a wedding, a wedding! There ought to be a wedding between Russia and the United States There’d be some pretty children some children, some children There’d be some pretty children to cheer the world along The classes liquidated liquidated, liquidated the rich would be supplanted by the meek enriched by love And we’d vote the tyrant under tyrant under, tyrant under by a landslide, by a landslide when we would. We would, we would! _=Every Day=_ Every day that I go out to my car I walk through a garden and wish often that Aristotle had gone on to a consideration of the dithyrambic poem—or that his notes had survived Coarse grass mars the fine lawn as I look about right and left tic toc— And right and left the leaves upon the yearling peach grow along the slender stem No rose is sure. Each is one rose and this, unlike another, opens flat, almost as a saucer without a cup. But it is a rose, rose pink. One can feel it turning slowly upon its thorny stem _=The Unfrocked Priest=_ 1 When a man had gone up in Russia from a small town to the University he returned a hero— people bowed down to him— his ego, nourished by this, mount- ed to notable works. 2 Here in the streets the kids say Hello Pete! to me— What can one be or imagine? Nothing is reverenced nothing looked up to. What can come of that sort of dis- respect for the under- standing? _=For G.B.S., Old=_ As the mind burns the external is swallowed nor can cold censor it when it launches its attack Sever man into his parts of bird and fish Wake him to the plausibilities of those changes he contemplates but does not dare And by such acceptance he forfeits the green perspectives which frightened him off to his own destruction— the mirage the shape of a shape become the shape he feared his Tempest frozen into a pattern of ice. _=The Words, the Words, the Words=_ The perfume of the iris, sweet citron, is enhanced by money, the odor of buckwheat, the woman’s odor. Sand does not chafe, with money. Sheep fold, horse neigh but money mollifies it. Leap or swim sleep or be drunk in whatever arms or none money is the crown Your eyes, thighs, breasts—rose pointed, money is their couch, their room, the light from between lattices . . . Lady behind the hedge, behind the wall: silken limbs, white brow, money filters in through the shelving leaves over you Rise and shake your skirts to the buttercups, yellow as polished gold =_Lustspiel=_ Vienna the Volk iss very lustig, she makes no sorry for anything! She likes to dance and sing! Vienna is a brave city, the girls have sturdy legs. Yeah! She likes to dance and sing! Death conquered Vienna but his men had to be called off because given the meanest break she’d lead them hellbent to chuck the racket for there’s not a soul in Vienna but likes to dance and sing! —drop their guns, dump the boss grab a girl and join the rest who like to dance and sing! Vienna the Volk iss very lustig, she makes no sorry for anything! She likes to dance and sing! _=April Is the Saddest Month=_ There they were stuck dog and bitch halving the compass Then when with his yip they parted oh how frolicsome she grew before him playful dancing and how disconsolate he retreated hang-dog she following through the shrubbery _=To Be Hungry Is to Be Great=_ The small, yellow grass-onion, spring’s first green, precursor to Manhattan’s pavements, when plucked as it comes, in bunches, washed, split and fried in a pan, though inclined to be a little slimy, if well cooked and served hot on rye bread is to beer a perfect appetizer— and the best part of it is they grow everywhere. _=The Complexity=_ Strange that their dog should look like the woman: the eyes close together the jowls prominent. But the man loves the dog too, an area curious in its resemblance to that other, a pleasant change from the woman. Volpe the man’s name is. Wolf he calls himself, a kindly fellow who sells Italian goat cheese . . . _=A Note=_ When the cataract dries up, my dear all minds attend it. There is nothing left. Neither sticks nor stones can build it up again nor old women with their rites of green twigs Bending over the remains, a body struck through the breast bone with a sharp spear—they have borne him to an ingle at the wood’s edge from which all maidenhood is shent —though he roared once the cataract is dried up and done. What rites can do to keep alive the memory of that flood they will do then bury it, old women that they are, secretly where all male flesh is buried. _=Drugstore Library=_ That’s the kind of books they read. They love their filth. Knee boots and they want to hear it suck when they pull ’em out _=The R R Bums=_ Their most prized possession— their liberty— Hands behind a coat shiny green. Tall, the eyes downcast— Sunlight through a clutter of wet clouds, lush weeds— The oriole! Hungry as an oriole. _=Choral: the Pink Church=_ _=Choral: the Pink Church=_ Pink as a dawn in Galilee whose stabbing fingers routed Aeschylus and murder blinked . . . —and tho’ I remember little as names go, the thrust of that first light was to me as through a heart of jade— as Chinese as you please but not by that—remote Now, the Pink Church trembles to the light (of dawn) again, rigors of more than sh’d wisely be said at one stroke, singing! Covertly. Subdued. Sing! transparent to the light through which the light shines, through the stone, until the stone-light glows, pink jade —that is the light and is a stone and is a church—if the image hold . . . as at a breath a face glows and fades! Come all ye aberrant, drunks, prostitutes, Surrealists— Gide and— Proust’s memory (in a cork diving suit looking under the sea of silence) to bear witness: Man is not sinful . . . unless he sin! —Poe, Whitman, Baudelaire the saints of this calendar. Oh ladies whose beds your husbands defile! man, man is the bringer of pure delights to you! Who else? And there stand the-banded-together in the name of the Philosophy Dep’ts wondering at the nature of the stuff poured into the urinals of custom . . . O Dewey! (John) O James! (William) O Whitehead! teach well! —above and beyond your teaching stands the Pink Church: the nipples of a woman who never bore a child . . . Oh what new vows shall we swear to make all swearing futile: the fool the mentally deranged the suicide? —suckled of its pink delight And beyond them all whine the slaughtered, the famished and the lonely— the holy church of their minds singing madly in tune, its stones sibilant and roaring— Soft voiced . . . To which, double bass: A torch to a heap of new branches under the tied feet of Michael Servitus: Be ye therefore perfect even as your Father in Heaven is perfect And all you liveried bastards, all (tho’ pardon me all you who come rightly under that holy term) Harken! —perfect as the pink and rounded breasts of a virgin! Scream it in their stupid ears— plugged by wads of newspulp— Joy! Joy! —out of Elysium! —chanted loud as a chorus from the Agonistes— Milton, the unrhymer, singing among the rest . . . like a Communist. _=Incognito=_ _=Incognito=_ I want to be where Fordie is (Bury my face in the dirt —like a Maori, those who slash their faces with knives, carving new lips, a nose dismembered the cheeks scar-coils, the forehead seamed—to live (for such a face is incognito, the man gone) like Fordie, no man now but an art for Cherubim and Seraphim to reface with words, intaglio. There Fordie sings to the harp, sighing. _=3 A.M. The Girl with the Honey Colored Hair=_ Everyone looked and, passing, revealed himself by the light of her hair heavy upon her shoulders —the haggard drunk holding onto the backs of the seats, face tense of a fixed purpose toward the toilet —the savage-looking female wearing a picture hat and mascara, hard eyes. And the two colored women: an older in a small beret and a younger in slicked glossy hair sitting, for protection and with side- long looks, close to her friend—all were affected as she turned frightened to address me, pitifully alone. _=A Crystal Maze=_ I Hard, hard to learn— that love, through bars and against back strokes, is to make mine each by his own gesture—the toss of a cigarette— giving, laying himself bare, offering, watching for its flash of certainty in the confused onslaught— —that any one is not one but twenty—twelve men, two women a hidden positive and a visible deception— Take it, black curls clustered in the hollow of the neck, unwilling to be released for less— laying desperately with impeccable composure an unnecessary body clean to the eye— And emerge curiously changed— amazement in that loveliness about the perfect breasts Venus, her way, close sister to the martyr—each his own way One avidly sheathing the flesh— one denying it. One loosed through the gone brain of an old man— Pity has no part in it— Loosed to take its course, love is the master—and the variable certainty in the crosses of uncertainty— the flesh, therewith, a quietness— and quieted—standing asserted II Hard, hard to learn— that love, against bars and counter strokes is mine, each by his own gesture— the toss of a cigarette— laying himself bare offering, watching for a flash of certainty in the confused onslaught— That one is not one but—twelve, two women, a hidden positive and a visible deception— Take it! black curls clustered in the hollow of the neck laying desperately with impeccable composure an uncalled for body clean to the eye— and emerging curiously changed— amazement in that loveliness about the perfect breasts— the flesh thereto a quietness and quieted, standing asserted _=New Mexico=_ Anger can be transformed to a kitten—as love may become a mountain in the disturbed mind, the mind that prances like a horse or nibbles, starts and stares in the parched sage of the triple world—of stone, stone layered and beaten under the confessed brilliance of this desert noon. _=Seafarer=_ The sea will wash in but the rocks—jagged ribs riding the cloth of foam or a knob or pinnacles with gannets— are the stubborn man. He invites the storm, he lives by it! instinct with fears that are not fears but prickles of ecstasy, a secret liquor, a fire that inflames his blood to coldness so that the rocks seem rather to leap at the sea than the sea to envelope them. They strain forward to grasp ships or even the sky itself that bends down to be torn upon them. To which he says, It is I! I who am the rocks! Without me nothing laughs. _=The Sound of Waves=_ A quatrain? Is that the end I envision? Rather the pace which travel chooses. Female? Rather the end of giving and receiving —of love: love surmounted is the incentive. Hardly. The incentive is nothing surmounted, the challenge lying elsewhere. No end but among words looking to the past, plaintive and unschooled, wanting a discipline But wanting more than discipline a rock to blow upon as a mist blows or rain is driven against some headland jutting into a sea—with small boats perhaps riding under it while the men fish there, words blowing in taking the shape of stone . . . . . Past that, past the image: a voice! out of the mist above the waves and the sound of waves, a voice . speaking! _=Venus over the Desert=_ If I do not sin, she said, you shall not walk in long gowns down stone corridors. There is no reprieve where there is no fall- ing off. I lie in your beds all night, from me you wake and go about your tasks. My flesh clings to your bones. What use is holiness unless it affirm my perfections, my breasts, my thighs which you part, shaking, and my lips the door to my pleasures? Sin, you call it, but there cannot be cold unless the heat has bred it, how can you know otherwise? Love comfort me in the face of my defeats! Poor monks, you think you are gentle but I tell you you kill as sure as shot kills a bird flying. _=Mists over the River=_ The river-mirror mirrors the cold sky through mists that tangle sunlight, the sunlight of early morning, in their veils veiling the dark outlines of the shores. But the necessity, you say, cries aloud for the adjusting—greater than song greater perhaps than all song While the song, self committed, the river a mirror swathed in sunlight the river in its own body cries out also, silently from its obscuring veils. You insist on my unqualified endorsement. Many years, I see, many years of reading have not made you wise. _=“I Would Not Change for Thine”=_ Shall I stroke your thighs, having eaten? Shall I kiss you, having drunk? Or drink to you only —leaving the poor soul who lives with her husband (the truck driver) three months, to spend the next six where she can find it, dropping the kid of that abandon in whatever hospital about the country will take her? (both have T.B.) What course has she to offer at her academy that he returns to her each year to listen, repeated, to the lectures of her adventures? And having drunk avidly and eaten of the philosophies of their reunion —tells her his own . ? Happy, happy married pair I should come to you fasting, my sweet—you to whom I would send a rosy wreath not so much honoring thee as lending it a hope that there I might remembered be. _=The Pause=_ Values are split, summer, the fierce jet an axe would not sever, spreads out at length, of its own weight, a rainbow over the lake of memory—the hard stem of pure speed broken. Autumn comes, fruit of many contours, that glistening tegument painters love hiding the soft pulp of the insidious reason, dormant, for worm to nibble or for woman. But there, within the seed, shaken by fear as by a sea, it wakes again! to drive upward, presently, from that soft belly such a stem as will crack quartz. Kitten! Kitten! grown woman! you curl into the pillows to make a man clamp his jaws for tenderness over you . stroking, stroking, the nerves taut, alert for the swift counter-slap will make him (you shall see) bear down hard. _=The Love Charm=_ Take this, the nexus of unreality, my head, I detach it for you. Take it in your hands, metal to eat out the heart, if held to the heart. Hold it to your heart and wait, only wait the while its fissions curdle. _=Approach to a City=_ Getting through with the world— I never tire of the mystery of these streets: the three baskets of dried flowers in the high bar-room window, the gulls wheeling above the factory, the dirty snow—the humility of the snow that silvers everything and is trampled and lined with use—yet falls again, the silent birds on the still wires of the sky, the blur of wings as they take off together. The flags in the heavy air move against a leaden ground—the snow pencilled with the stubble of old weeds: I never tire of these sights but refresh myself there always for there is small holiness to be found in braver things. _=Song=_ If I could count the silence I could sleep, sleep. But it is one, one. No head even to gnaw. Spinning. If I could halt the glazed spinning, surface of glass, my mind could shove in its fingers and break apart the smooth singleness of the night— until sleep dropped as rain upon me. _=A Rosebush in an Unlikely Garden=_ The flowers are yours the full blown the half awakened yours who fished heads and arms on D day in a net from the bloody river The stillness of this squalid corner this veined achievement is yours _=The Lion=_ 1 Traffic, the lion, the sophisticate, facing the primitive, alabaster, the new fallen snow stains its chastity the new shade Use defames! the attack disturbs our sleep This is the color of the road, the color of the lion, sand color —to follow the lion, of use or usage, even to church! the bells achime above the fallen snow! —all follow the same road, space. 2 Winter, the churned snow, the lion flings the woman, taking her by the throat upon his gullied shoulders—shaking the weight fast and unmolested plunges with her among the trees—where the whiteness sparkles—to devour her there: transit to uses: where the traffic mounts, a chastity packed with lewdness, a rule, dormant, against the loosely fallen snow—the thick muscles working under the skin, the head like a tree-stump, gnawing: chastity to employment, lying down bloodied to bed together for the last time. _=An Eternity=_ Come back, Mother, come back from the dead—not to “Syria,” not there but hither—to this place. You are old, Mother, old and almost cold, come back from the dead—where I cannot yet join you. Wait awhile, wait a little while. Like Todhunter let us give up rhyme. This winter moonlight is a bitter thing, I like it no better than you do. Let us wait for some darker moment of the moon. At ninety the strangeness of death is upon you. I have been to all corners of the mind. What gift can I bring you but luxury and that you have taught me to despise. I turn my face to the wall, revert to my beginnings and turn my face also to the wall. And yet, Mother, that isn’t true. —the night, the night we face is black but of no more weight than the day—the day we faced and were defeated and yet lived to face the night in which the fair moon shines—its continents visible to the naked eye! Naked is a good word in that context —makes the night light! light as a feather (in the night!) The soul, my dear, is paramount, the soul of things that makes the dead moon shine. Frankly, I do not love you. All I can see (by the moon’s flame) whatever answer there may be otherwise, _that_ we know, is abandoned I remember how at eighty-five you battled through the crisis and survived! I suppose, in fact I know, you’ve never heard of Shapley— an astronomer. Now there’s a man— the best . . Not like Flamarion, your old favorite, who wanted to popularize astronomy, Shapley’s not like Flamarion You preceded him. It is the loveless soul, the soul of things that has surpassed our loves. In this—you live, Mother, live in me . always. _=The Three Graces=_ We have the picture of you in mind, when you were young, posturing (for a photographer) in scarves (if you could have done it) but now, for none of you is immortal, ninety- three, the three, ninety and three, Mary, Ellen and Emily, what beauty is it clings still about you? Undying? Magical? For there is still no answer, why we live or why you will not live longer than I or that there should be an answer why any should live and whatever other should die. Yet you live. You live and all that can be said is that you live, time cannot alter it— and as I write this Mary has died. _=The Horse Show=_ Constantly near you, I never in my entire sixty-four years knew you so well as yesterday or half so well. We talked. You were never so lucid, so disengaged from all exigencies of place and time. We talked of ourselves, intimately, a thing never heard of between us. How long have we waited? almost a hundred years. You said, Unless there is some spark, some spirit we keep within ourselves, life, a continuing life’s impossible—and it is all we have. There is no other life, only the one. The world of the spirits that comes afterward is the same as our own, just like you sitting there they come and talk to me, just the same. They come to bother us. Why? I said. I don’t know. Perhaps to find out what we are doing. Jealous, do you think? I don’t know. I don’t know why they should want to come back. I was reading about some men who had been buried under a mountain, I said to her, and one of them came back after two months, digging himself out. It was in Switzerland, you remember? Of course I remember. The villagers tho’t it was a ghost coming down to complain. They were frightened. They do come, she said, what you call my “visions.” I talk to them just as I am talking to you. I see them plainly. Oh if I could only read! You don’t know what adjustments I have made. All I can do is to try to live over again what I knew when your brother and you were children—but I can’t always succeed. Tell me about the horse show. I have been waiting all week to hear about it. Mother darling, I wasn’t able to get away. Oh that’s too bad. It was just a show; they make the horses walk up and down to judge them by their form. Oh is that all? I tho’t it was something else. Oh they jump and run too. I wish you had been there, I was so interested to hear about it. _=The Birth of Venus=_ _=The Birth of Venus=_ Today small waves are rippling, crystal clear, upon the pebbles at Villefranche whence from the wall, at the Parade Grounds of the Chasseurs Alpins, we stood and watched them; or passing along the cliff on the ledge between the sea and the old fortress, heard the long swell stir without cost among the rock’s teeth. But we are not there!—as in the Crimea the Black Sea is blue with waves under a smiling sky, or be it the Labrador North Shore, or wherever else in the world you will, the world of indolence and April; as, November next, spring will enliven the African coast southward and we not there, not there, not there! Why not believe that we shall be young again? Surely nothing could be more to our desire, more pebble-plain under a hand’s breath wavelet, a jeweled thing, a Sapphic bracelet, than this. Murder staining the small waves crimson is not more moving—though we strain in our minds to make it so, and stare. Cordite, heavy shells falling on the fortifications of Sebastopol, fired by the Germans first, then by the Russians, are indifferent to our agony—as are small waves in the sunlight. But we need not elect what we do not desire. Torment, in the daisied fields before Troy or at Amiens or the Manchurian plain is not of itself the dearest desired of our world. We do not have to die, in bitterness and the most excruciating torture, to feel! We can lean on the wall and experience an ecstasy of pain, if pain it must be, but a pain of love, of dismemberment if you will, but a pain of almond blossoms, an agony of mimosa trees in bloom, a scented cloud! Even, as old Ford would say, an exquisite sense of viands. Would there be no sculpture, no painting, no Pinturicchio, no Botticelli—or frescos on the jungle temples of Burma (that the jungles have reclaimed) or Picasso at Cannes but for war? Would there be no voyages starting from the dunes at Huelva over the windy harbor? No Seville cathedral? Possibly so. Even the quietness of flowers is perhaps deceptive. But why must we suffer ourselves to be so torn to sense our world? Or believe we must so suffer to be born again? Let the homosexuals seduce whom they will under what bushes along the coasts of the Middle Sea rather than have us insist on murder. Governments are defeats, distor- tions. I wish (and so I fail). Notwithstanding, I wish we might learn of an April of small waves—deadly as all slaughter, that we shall die soon enough, to dream of April, not knowing why we have been struck down, heedless of what greater violence. _=14 New Poems (1950)=_ _=May 1st Tomorrow=_ The mind’s a queer sponge squeeze it and out come bird songs small leaves highly enameled and . moments of good reading (rapidly) _Tuck, tuck, tuck, tuck, tuck!_ —the mind remembering . Not, _not_ in flux (that diarrhoea) but nesting. _Chee woo! Tuck!_ the male mind, nesting: glancing up from a letter from a friend asking . the mind to be . squeezed and let _him_ be the liquor which, when we release it, _he_ shall be sopped up, _all_ his weight, and released again . by squeezing. Full, it moulds itself . . . like a brown breast, full not of milk but of what breasts are to the eye, hemispherical (2 would make a sphere) to the mind; a view of the mind that, in a way, gives milk: that liquor that minds feed upon. To feed, to feed now! _Chuck, chuck, chuck. Toe whee. Chuck!_ —burdensome as twin stones that the mind alone can milk and give again . _Chee woo! etcetera_ _=Après le Bain=_ I gotta buy me a new girdle. (I’ll buy you one) O.K. (I wish you’d wig- gle that way for me, I’d be a happy man) I GOTTA wig- gle for _this_. (You pig) _=Spring Is Here Again, Sir.=_ Goffle brook of a May day (_Mon cher Cocteau_ _qui déjeune des fois_ _avec Picasso_) blossoms in the manner of antiquity Which is an obliquity for the movement and the sheen of ripples bridging the gap for age-old winnowing decay— from then to now. Which leaves very little but the sun and air unless one should prefer a pool of human spittle over which to grieve. Rhyme it regularly if you will. I say the night is not always gay for an old man who has sinned. But the brook! is mine and I must still prefer it to the summits of Thibet from which to take off: —of spring, to the air for relief! smell of clover, cherries are ripening. We lay, Floss and I, on the grass together, in the warm air: a bird flew into a bush, dipped our hands in the running water— cold, too cold; but found it, to our satisfaction, as in the past, still wet. _=The Hard Core of Beauty=_ The most marvellous is not the beauty, deep as that is, but the classic attempt at beauty, at the swamp’s center: the dead-end highway, abandoned when the new bridge went in finally. There, either side an entry from which, burned by the sun, the paint is peeling— two potted geraniums . Step inside: on a wall, a painted plaque showing ripe pomegranates . —and, leaving, note down the road—on a thumbnail, you could sketch it on a thumbnail— stone steps climbing full up the front to a second floor minuscule portico peaked like the palate of a child! God give us again such assurance. There are rose bushes either side this entrance and plum trees (one dead) surrounded at the base by worn-out auto-tire casings! for what purpose but the glory of the Godhead that poked her twin shoulders, supporting the draggled blondness of her tresses, from beneath the patient waves. And we? the whole great world abandoned for nothing at all, intact, the lost world of symmetry and grace: bags of charcoal piled deftly under the shed at the rear, the ditch at the very rear a passageway through the mud, triumphant! to pleasure, pleasure; pleasure by boat, a by-way of a Sunday to the smooth river. _=Tolstoy=_ That art is evil (stale art, he might have said) was to his mind as weevil to the cotton-head Stale art, like stale fish stinks (I might have said) You are ageing, Master Commit yourself to Heaven _=Cuchulain=_ I had been his fool not a dog not his murderer To court war which I redreamed —he suffered To force him backward into the sea blood of his blood Blood of my blood in tortured bewilderment —his fool, shrewd witted to protect and beguile him To read rather that which I suffered Not a morose pig his doom to escape only My fate—take upon myself the kindler, the Match-man, the mind miner, the very woman His life lived in me warmed at his fires A power in the night. Madman, clown— success _=Twelve Line Poem=_ Pitiful lovers broken by your loves the head of a man the parts disjointed of a woman unshaved pushing forward And you? Withdrawn caressive the thighs limp eyes filling with tears the lower lip trembling, why do you try so hard to be a man? You are a lover! Why adopt the reprehensible absurdities of an inferior attitude? _=Nun’s Song=_ For the wrongs that women do we dedicate ourselves, O God, to You and beg You to believe that we truly grieve. Our defects, not fear, drive us to seek to be so very near Your loving tenderness that You may bless us everlastingly; not dread, but risen from the sorry dead that each may be, at Your side a very bride! _=Turkey in the Straw=_ I’ll put this in my diary: On my 65th birthday I kissed her while she pissed (Your thighs are apple trees whose blossoms touch the sky!) On my 65th birthday I tussled her breasts. She didn’t even turn away but smiled! It’s your 65th birthday! (I kissed her while she pissed) _=Another Old Woman=_ If I could keep her here, near me I’d fill her mind with my thoughts She would get their complexion and live again. But I could not live along with her she would drain me as sand drains water. Visions pos- sess her. Dreams unblooded walk her mind. Her mind does not faint. Throngs visit her: We are at war with Mexico—to please her fancy— A cavalry column is deploying over a lifeless terrain —to impress us! She describes it her face bemused— alert to details. They ride without saddles tho’ she is ig- norant of the word “bareback,” but knows accurately that I am not her son, now, but a stranger listening. She breaks off, her looks intent, bent inward, with a curious glint to her eyes: They say that when the fish comes! (gesture of getting a strike) it is a great joy! _=Wide Awake, Full of Love=_ Being in this stage I look to the last, see myself returning: the seamed face as of a tired rider upon a tired horse coming up . . . What of your dish-eyes that have seduced me? Your voice whose cello notes upon the theme have led me to the music? I see your neck scrawny your thighs worn your hair thinning, whose round brow pushes it aside, and turn again upon the thought: To migrate to that South to hop again upon the shining grass there half ill with love and mope and will not startle for the grinning worm Pluck the florets from a clover head and suck the honey, sweet. The world will realign itself—ex- cluding Russia and the U.S.A. and planes run soon by atomic power defying gravity. Pluck the florets from a clover head and suck the honey, sweet. _=Song=_ Russia! Russia! you might say and furrow the brow but I say: There are flowers upon the R.R. embankment woven by growing in and out among the rusted guard cables lying there in the grass, flowers daisy shaped, pink and white in this September glare. Count upon it there will be soon a further revolution. _=Convivio=_ We forget sometimes that no matter what our quarrels we are the same brotherhood: the rain falling or the rain withheld, —berated by women, barroom smells or breath of Persian roses! our wealth is words. And when we go down to defeat, before the words, it is still within and the concern of, first, the brotherhood. Which should quiet us, warm and arm us besides to attack, always attack—but to reserve our worst blows for the enemy, those who despise the word, flout it, stem, leaves and root; the liars who decree laws with no purpose other than to make a screen of them for larceny, murder—for our murder, we who salute the word and would have it clean, full of sharp movement. _=Two Pendants: for the Ears=_ _=The Lesson=_ The hydrangea pink cheeked nods its head a paper brain without a skull a brain intestined to the invisible root where beside the rose and acorn thought lies communal with the brooding worm True but the air remains the wanton the dancing that holding enfolds it a flower aloof Flagrant as a flag it shakes that seamy head or snaps it drily from the anchored stem and sets it rolling _=Two Pendants: for the Ears=_ I _The particulars of morning are more to be desired_ _than night’s vague images._ I dreamed of a tiger, wounded, lying broken upon a low parapet at least they said it was a tiger though I never saw it—more than a shadow— for the night: an open plaza before the post-office —but very obscure When I arrived the people were underground huddled into a group and terrified from the recent happenings: a terrific fight, apparently— between the beast and a man, its trainer, lying he also, out there now horribly wounded—perhaps dead or exhausted —during a lull of the encounter, having defended himself well —and bleeding. No one knew or exactly knew how the immediate situation lay. Thoughtlessly or at least without thought, my instinct took me toward the man. I walked into the darkness toward the scene of the fight. Somewhat to the right apparently unable to lift itself and hanging upon the stone wall, I seemed to make out the beast and could hear it panting, heavily At the same moment, to the left, on the ground under the wall, I saw, or rather heard, the man—or what I took to be the man. He was mewing softly, a spasmodic high pitched sighing—probably unconscious. As I got half way out from the people huddled back of me to the scene of the conflict the breathing of the beast stopped as though the better for him to listen and I could feel him watching me. I paused. I could make out nothing clearly and then did the logical thing: unarmed I saw that I was helpless and so turned and walked back to the others. Has no one notified the police? I said. That was the end of the dream. The yard from the bathroom window is another matter: Here everything is clear. The wind sounds, I can make out the yellow of the flowers— For half an hour I do not move. It is Easter Sunday The short and brilliantly stabbing grass (my son went out during the night and has not returned—later I found that he had returned and had fallen asleep on the couch downstairs— his bed was empty) —marked (plotted) by the squares and oblongs of the flower beds (beds! beds for the flowers) the sticks of roses that will later show brilliant blooms stand out in rows, irregularly A cloud unclassic, a white unnamed cloud of small tufts of white flowers light as wishes (later to give place to red berries called service berries) —a cloud through which the east sun shines, anonymous (a tree marked by the practical sense of my countrymen the shad bush . to say fish are in the river) floating There are no girls here not above virtual infancy —small white flowers shining profusely together Thousands of glittering small leaves that no church bell calls to Mass —but there will be a mass soon on the weighted branches —their smiles vanish at the age of four. Later they sob and throw their arms about my waist, babies I have myself delivered from their agonized mothers. They sob and cling to me, their breasts heavy with milk, pressing my coat and refuse to let go until their sobs quiet. Then they smile (at me) through their tears. But it is only for a moment—they soon become women again. The wind howled still at my bedroom window but here, overlooking the garden, I no longer hear its howls nor see it moving . My thoughts are like the distant smile of a child who will (never) be a beautiful woman like the distant smile of a woman who will say: —only to keep you a moment longer. Oh I know I’m a stinker— but only to keep you, it’s only to keep you . a few moments Let me have a cigarette. The little flowers got the names we might bestow now upon drugs for headaches and obesity. It is periwinkle time now. How can you, my countrymen (what bathos hangs about that title, unwarranted in good measure but there: a fault of art) how can you permit yourselves to be so cheated—your incomes taken away and you, chromium in your guts (rat poison) until you are swollen beyond all recognition It is not in a return to the ideals preserved for us by primitive peoples that our society will heal itself of its maladies We read, after breakfast, Flossie, our son and I—or rather I read to them from a friendly poet’s translations, _Plato’s Inscription for a Statue_ _of Pan_ (I know no Greek) He said: Be still O green cliffs of the Dryads Still O springs bubbling from the rocks and be still Many voiced crying of the ewes: It is Pan Pan with his sweet pipe: the clever lips run Over the withed reeds while all about him Rise from the ground to dance with joyous tread The nymphs of the water nymphs of the oaken forest —forgot (baby) but it seems less out of place than the present, all the present for all that it is present (baby) The two or three young fruit trees, even the old and battered watering can of characteristic shape (made to pour from the bottom) are looking up at us . I say “us” but I mean, alas, only me. II ELENA You lean the head forward and wave the hand, with a smile, twinkling the fingers I say to myself Now it is spring Elena is dying What snows, what snow enchained her— she of the tropics is melted now she is dying The mango, the guava long forgot for apple and cherry wave good-bye now it is spring Elena is dying Good-bye You think she’s going to die? said the old boy. She’s not going to die—not now. In two days she’ll be all right again. When she dies she’ll . If only she wouldn’t exhaust herself, broke in the sturdy woman, his wife. She fights so. You can’t quieten her. When she dies she’ll go out like a light. She’s done it now two or three times when the wife’s had her up, absolutely out. But so far she’s always come out of it. Why just an hour ago she sat up straight on that bed, as straight as ever I saw her in the last ten years, straight as a ram-rod. You wouldn’t believe that would you? She’s not going to die . she’ll be raising Cain, looking for her grub as per usual in the next two or three days, you wait and see Listen, I said, I met a man last night told me what he’d brought home from the market: 2 partridges 2 Mallard ducks a Dungeness crab 24 hours out of the Pacific and 2 live-frozen trout from Denmark What about that? Elena is dying (I wonder) willows and pear trees whose encrusted branches blossom all a mass attend her on her way— a guerdon (a garden) and cries of children indeterminate Holy, holy, holy (no ritual but fact . in fact) until the end of time (which is now) How can you weep for her? I cannot, I her son—though I could weep for her without compromising the covenant She will go alone. —or pat to the times: go wept by a clay statuette (if there be miracles) a broken head of a small St. Anne who wept at a kiss from a child: She was so lonely And Magazine #1 sues Magazine #2, no less guilty—for libel or infringement or dereliction or confinement Elena is dying (but perhaps not yet) _Pis-en-lit_ attend her (I see the children have been here) Said Jowles, from under the Ionian sea: What do you think about that miracle, Doc?—that little girl kissing the head of that statue and making it cry? I hadn’t seen it. It’s in the papers, tears came out of the eyes. I hope it doesn’t turn out to be something funny. Let’s see now: St. Anne is the grandmother of Jesus. So that makes St. Anne the mother of the Virgin Mary M’s a great letter, I confided. What’s that? So now it gets to be Easter—you never know. Never. No, never. The river, throwing off sparks in a cold world Is this a private foight or kin I get into it? This is a private fight. Elena is dying. In her delirium she said a terrible thing: Who are you? NOW! I, I, I, I stammered. I am your son. Don’t go. I am unhappy. About what? I said About what is what. The woman (who was watching) added: She thinks I’m her father. Swallow it now: she wants to do it herself. Let her spit. At last! she said two days later coming to herself and seeing me: —but I’ve been here every day, Mother. Well why don’t they put you where I can see you then? She was crying this morning, said the woman, I’m glad you came. Let me clean your glasses. They put them on my nose! They’re trying to make a monkey out of me. Were you thinking of La Fontaine? Can’t you give me something to make me disappear completely, said she sobbing—but completely! No I can’t do that Sweetheart (You God damned belittling fool, said I to myself) There’s a little Spanish wine, _pajarete_ p-a-j-a-r-e-t-e But pure Spanish! I don’t suppose they have it any more. (The woman started to move her) But I have to see my chil Let me straighten you I don’t want the hand (my hand) there (on her forehead) —digging the nail of her left thumb hard into my flesh, the back of my own thumb holding her hand . . “If I had a dog ate meat on Good Friday I’d kill him.” said someone off to the left Then after three days: I’m glad to see you up and doing, said she to me brightly. I told you she wasn’t going to die, that was just a remission, I think you call it, said the 3 day beard in a soiled undershirt I’m afraid I’m not much use to you, Mother, said I feebly. I brought you a bottle of wine —a little late for Easter Did you? What kind of wine? A light wine? Sherry. What? _Jeres._ You know, _jerez_. Here (giving it to her) So big! That will be my baby now! (cuddling it in her arms) _Ave Maria Purissime!_ It is heavy! I wonder if I could take a little glass of it now? Has she eaten anything yet? Has she eaten anything yet! Six oysters—she said she wanted some fish and that’s all we had. A round of bread and butter and a banana My God! —two cups of tea and some ice-cream. Now she wants the wine. Will it hurt her? No, I think nothing will hurt her. She’s one of the wonders of the world I think, said his wife. (To make the language record it, facet to facet not bored out— with an auger. —to give also the unshaven, the rumblings of a catastrophic past, a delicate defeat—vivid simulations of the mystery . ) We had leeks for supper, I said What? Leeks! Hulda gave them to me, they were going to seed, the rabbits had eaten everything else. I never tasted better—from Pop’s old garden . Pop’s old what? I’ll have to clean out her ears So my year is ended. Tomorrow it will be April, the glory gone the hard-edged light elapsed. Were it not for the March within me, the intensity of the cold sun, I could not endure the drag of the hours opposed to that weight, the profusion to come later, that comes too late. I have already swum among the bars, the angular contours, I have already lived the year through Elena is dying The canary, I said, comes and sits on our table in the morning at breakfast, I mean walks about on the table with us there and pecks at the table-cloth He must be a smart little bird Good-bye! _=To Close=_ Will you please rush down and see ma baby. You know, the one I talked to you about last night What was that? Is this the baby specialist? Yes, but perhaps you mean my son, can’t you wait until . ? I, I, I don’t think it’s brEAthin’ _=The Rose=_ _=Publisher’s Note=_ The poems of the section “The Rose” were omitted from the first printing of “The Collected Later Poems” through an oversight on the part of a typist. There was also an unfortunate omission from the list of Acknowledgments on page xl. Dr. Williams’ poems “Choral: The Pink Church,” “The Words, The Words, The Words,” “Venus Over the Desert,” “Mists Over the River,” “I Would Not Change for Thine,” “The Love Charm,” “Song,” “A Rosebush in an Unlikely Garden,” “The Lion,” “New Mexico,” and “Mama” were published in a chap book entitled “The Pink Church,” by The Golden Goose Press of Columbus, Ohio, to whose editor, Mr. Richard Wirtz Emerson, the author and publisher now express their apologies and recognition. Certain of the poems in this volume were also first published in the magazine _Cronos_, which was published by The Golden Goose Press. _=The Rose=_ The stillness of the rose in time of war reminds me of the long sleep just begun of that sparrow his head pillowed unroughed and unalarmed upon the polished pavement or of voluptuous hours with some breathless book when stillness was an eternity long since begun _=The Visit=_ I have committed many errors but I warn—the interplay is not the tossed body. Though the mind is subtler than the sea, advancing at three speeds, the fast, the medium and the slow, recapitulating at every ninth wave what was not at first directly stated, that is still only on the one level. There are the fish and at the bottom, the ground, no matter whether at five feet or five miles, the ground, revealing, when bared by the tides, living barnacles, hungry on the rocks as the mind is, that hiss as often loudly when the sun bites them. And I acknowledge, the mind is still (though rarely) more than its play. I can see also the dagger in the left hand when the right strikes. It does not alter the case. Let us resume. The naive may be like a sunny day deceptive and is not to be despised because it is so amusing to see the zigzag and slender gulls dip into the featureless surface. It is fish they are after, fish—and get them. Still I acknowledge the sea is there and I admire its profundity only what does that amount to? Love also may be deep, deep as thought, deeper than thought and as sequential— thought full of detail, let us say, as the courts are full of law and the sea, weeds and as murmurous: that does not alter the case either. Yet you are right in the end: law often decides cases. Well? I prefer to go back to my cases at the hospital. Say I am less an artist than a spadeworker but one who has no aversion to taking his spade to the head of any who would derrogate his performance in the craft. You were kind to be at such pains with me and—thanks for the view. _=Ol’ Bunk’s Band=_ These are men! the gaunt, unfore- sold, the vocal, blatant, Stand up, stand up! the slap of a bass-string. Pick, ping! The horn, the hollow horn long drawn out, a hound deep tone— Choking, choking! while the treble reed races—alone, ripples, screams slow to fast— to second to first! These are men! Drum, drum, drum, drum, drum drum, drum! the ancient cry, escaping crapulence eats through transcendent—torn, tears, term town, tense, turns and back off whole, leaps up, stomps down, rips through! These are men beneath whose force the melody limps— to proclaim, proclaims—Run and lie down, in slow measures, to rest and not never need no more! These are men! Men! _=Lear=_ When the world takes over for us and the storm in the trees replaces our brittle consciences (like ships, female to all seas) when the few last yellow leaves stand out like flags on tossed ships at anchor—our minds are rested Yesterday we sweated and dreamed or sweated in our dreams walking at a loss through the bulk of figures that appeared solid, men or women, but as we approached down the paved corridor melted—Was it I?—like smoke from bonfires blowing away Today the storm, inescapable, has taken the scene and we return our hearts to it, however made, made wives by it and though we secure ourselves for a dry skin from the drench of its passionate approaches we yield and are made quiet by its fury Pitiful Lear, not even you could out-shout the storm—to make a fool cry! Wife to its power might you not better have yielded earlier? as on ships facing the seas were carried once the figures of women at repose to signify the strength of the waves’ lash. _=A Unison=_ The grass is very green, my friend, and tousled, like the head of— your grandson, yes? And the mountain, the mountain we climbed twenty years since for the last time (I write this thinking of you) is saw-horned as then upon the sky’s edge—an old barn is peaked there also, fatefully, against the sky. And there it is and we can’t shift it or change it or parse it or alter it in any way. _Listen! Do you not hear_ _them? the singing?_ There it is and we’d better acknowledge it and write it down, not otherwise. Not twist the words to mean what we should have said but to mean —what cannot be escaped: the mountain riding the afternoon as it does, the grass matted green, green underfoot and the air— rotten wood. _Hear! Hear them!_ _the Undying._ The hill slopes away, then rises in the middleground, you remember, with a grove of gnarled maples centering the bare pasture, sacred, surely—for what reason? I cannot say? Idyllic! a shrine cinctured there by the trees, a certainty of music! a unison and a dance, joined at this death’s festival: Something of a shed snake’s skin, the beginning goldenrod. Or, best, a white stone, you have seen it: _Mathilda Maria_ _Fox_—and near the ground’s lip, all but undecipherable, _Aet Suae_ _Anno 9_—still there, the grass dripping of last night’s rain—and welcome! The thin air, the near, clear brook water!—and could not, and died, unable; to escape what the air and the wet grass— through which, tomorrow, bejeweled, the great sun will rise—the unchanging mountains, forced on them— and they received, willingly! Stones, stones of a difference joining the others, at pace. _Hear!_ _Hear the unison of their voices. . . ._ _=The Quality of Heaven=_ Without other cost than breath and the poor soul, carried in the cage of the ribs, chirping shrilly I walked in the garden. The garden smelled of roses. The lilies’ green throats opened to yellow trumpets that craved no sound and the rain was fresh in my face, the air a sweet breath. Yesterday the heat was oppressive dust clogged the leaves’ green and bees from the near hive, parched, drank, overeager, at the birdbath and were drowned there. Others replaced them from which the birds were frightened. —the fleece-light air! _=The Province=_ The figure of tall white grass by the cinder-bank keeps its alignment faultlessly. Moves! in the brilliant channels of the wind Shines! its polished shafts and feathered fronds ensconced there colorless beyond all feeling This is the principle of the godly, fluted, a statue tall and pale —lifeless save only in beauty, the kernel of all seeking, the eternal _=The Injury=_ From this hospital bed I can hear an engine breathing—somewhere in the night: —Soft coal, soft coal, soft coal! And I know it is men breathing shoveling, resting— —Go about it the slow way, if you can find any way— Christ! who’s a bastard? —quit and quit shoveling. A man breathing and it quiets and the puff of steady work begins slowly: Chug. Chug. Chug. Chug. . . . fading off. Enough coal at least for this small job Soft! Soft! —enough for one small engine, enough for that. A man shoveling working and not lying here in this hospital bed—powerless —with the white-throat calling in the poplars before dawn, his faint flute-call, triple tongued, piercing the shingled curtain of the new leaves; drowned out by car wheels singing now on the rails, taking the curve, slowly, a long wail, high pitched: rounding the curve— —the slow way because (if you can find any way) that is the only way left now for you. _=The Brilliance=_ Oh sock, sock, sock! brief but persistent. Emulate the gnat or a tree’s leaves that are not the tree but mass to shape it. Finis! Finish and get out of this. _=The Semblables=_ The red brick monastery in the suburbs over against the dust- hung acreage of the unfinished and all but subterranean munitions plant: those high brick walls behind which at Easter the little orphans and bastards in white gowns sing their Latin responses to the hoary ritual while frankincense and myrrh round out the dark chapel making an enclosed sphere of it of which they are the worm: that cell outside the city beside the polluted stream and dump heap, uncomplaining, and the field of upended stones with a photo under glass fastened here and there to one of them near the deeply carved name to distinguish it: that trinity of slate gables the unembellished windows piling up, the chapel with its round window between the dormitories peaked by the bronze belfry peaked in turn by the cross, verdegris—faces all silent that miracle that has burst sexless from between the carrot rows. Leafless white birches, their empty tendrils swaying in the all but no breeze guard behind the spiked monastery fence the sacred statuary. But ranks of brilliant car-tops row on row give back in all his glory the late November sun and hushed attend, before that tumbled ground, those sightless walls and shovelled entrances where no one but a lonesome cop swinging his club gives sign, that agony within where the wrapt machines are praying. . . . _=Index of Poems by Titles=_ _=Index of Poems by Titles=_ A Cold Front 57 A Crystal Maze 167 A Flowing River 21 Against the Sky 58 A History of Love 77 Aigeltinger 65 All That Is Perfect in Woman 139 An Address 59 And Who Do You Think “They” Are? 131 An Eternity 182 A Note 154 Another Old Woman 205 Another Year 56 A Place (Any Place) to Transcend All Places 113 A Plea for Mercy 34 Approach to a City 177 Après le Bain 196 April Is the Saddest Month 152 A Rosebush in an Unlikely Garden 179 A Sort of a Song 7 A Vision of Labor: 1931 42 A Woman in Front of a Bank 70 Ballad of Faith 131 Burning the Christmas Greens 16 Catastrophic Birth 8 Chanson 72 Childe Harold to the Round Tower Came 133 Choral: The Pink Church 159 Cuchulain 201 Convivio 209 Design for November 87 Drugstore Library 155 Education a Failure 80 Eternity 36 Every Day 147 Fertile 41 Figueras Castle 35 For a Low Voice 105 For G.B.S., Old 149 Franklin Square 67 Graph 102 Hard Times 90 His Daughter 86 In Chains 19 Incognito 165 In Sisterly Fashion 19 Io Baccho! 135 “I Would Not Change for Thine” 174 Jingle 146 Labrador 68 Lament 76 Lustspiel 151 Mama 176 May 1st Tomorrow 195 Mists over the River 173 Navajo 101 New Mexico 169 Note to Music: Brahms 1st Piano Concerto 111 Nun’s Song 203 Paterson: the Falls 10 Perfection 40 Philomena Andronico 120 Picture of a Nude in a Machine Shop 107 Prelude to Winter 55 Raindrops on a Briar 99 Raleigh Was Right 52 Rumba! Rumba! 34 Russia 93 Seafarer 170 Silence 56 Sometimes It Turns Dry and the Leaves Fall before They Are Beautiful 54 Song 178 Song 208 Song 208 Sparrows Among Dry Leaves 55 Spring Is Here Again,Sir 197 Suzanne 100 St. Valentine 32 The A, B & C of It 45 The Act 96 The Aftermath 47 The Apparition 68 The Banner Bearer 81 The Bare Tree 51 The Birdsong 73 The Birth of Venus 189 The Bitter World of Spring 75 The Centenarian 136 The Clouds 124 The Complexity 153 The Controversy 39 The Cure 23 The Dance 11 The Dish of Fruit 91 The End of the Parade 45 The Flower 104 The Forgotten City 49 The Gentle Rejoinder 59 The Girl 123 The Goat 82 The Hard Core of Beauty 199 The Hard Listener 38 The Horse 89 The Horse Show 185 The Hounded Lovers 22 The Hurricane 108 The Last Turn 44 The Lesson 213 The Light Shall Not Enter 69 The Lion 180 The Love Charm 176 The Manoeuvre 88 The Mind’s Games 109 The Mind Hesitant 118 The Mirrors 85 The Monstrous Marriage 53 The Motor-Barge 92 The Night Rider 71 The Non-Entity 132 The Observer 20 The Old House 116 The Pause 175 The Poem 33 The Rat 145 The Red-Wing Blackbird 112 The R R Bums 155 The Savage Beast 97 The Sound of Waves 171 The Storm 48 The Stylist 110 The Testament of Perpetual Change 103 The Thing 117 The Thoughtful Lover 46 The Three Graces 184 The Unfrocked Priest 148 The Well Disciplined Bargeman 98 The Woodpecker 122 The Words Lying Idle 106 The Words, the Words, the Words 150 The World Narrowed to a Point 20 The Yellow Chimney 50 The Young Cat and the Chrysanthemums 33 These Purists 41 3 A.M. The Girl with the Honey Colored Hair 166 Three Sonnets 30 To a Lovely Old Bitch 74 To All Gentleness 24 To Be Hungry Is to Be Great 153 To Close 230 To Ford Madox Ford in Heaven 60 Tolstoy 200 Tragic Detail 119 Turkey in the Straw 204 Twelve Line Poem 202 Two Deliberate Exercises 83 Two Pendants: for the Ears 214 Venus over the Desert 172 When Structure Fails Rhyme Attempts to Come to the Rescue 79 Wide Awake, Full of Love 207 Writer’s Prologue to a Play in Verse 12 THE END TRANSCRIBER NOTES Punctuation and layout has been maintained as in the printed version. Book name and author have been added to the original book cover. [The end of _The Collected Later Poems of William Carlos Williams_ by William Carlos Williams]