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IF THE BOOK IS UNDER COPYRIGHT IN YOUR COUNTRY, DO NOT DOWNLOAD OR REDISTRIBUTE THIS FILE. _Title:_ Pictures from Brueghel and Other Poems _Date of first publication:_ 1962 _Author:_ William Carlos Williams (1883-1963) _Date first posted:_ Nov. 25, 2019 _Date last updated:_ Nov. 25, 2019 Faded Page eBook #20191144 This eBook was produced by: Al Haines, Jen Haines & the online Distributed Proofreaders Canada team at https://www.pgdpcanada.net [Cover Illustration] Pictures from Brueghel and other poems by William Carlos Williams including The Desert Music & Journey to Love London MacGibbon & Kee 1963 © 1949, 1951, 1952, 1953, 1954, 1955, 1956, 1957, 1959, 1960, 1961 and 1962 by William Carlos Williams. THE DESERT MUSIC AND OTHER POEMS Copyright, 1949, 1951, 1952, 1953, 1954, by William Carlos Williams. Reprinted by permission of Random House, Inc. JOURNEY TO LOVE © Copyright, 1955, by William Carlos Williams. Copyright, 1954, by William Carlos Williams. Reprinted by permission of Random House, Inc. Of the poems in this volume, the “Pictures from Brueghel” sequence first appeared in _The Hudson Review_. Others appeared originally in the following magazines, to which acknowledgement is here made: _The Atlantic Monthly_, _Art News Annual_, _Botteghe Oscure_, _Chicago Review_, _College Music Symposium_ of the Moravian Music Foundation, Inc., _East & West_, _Epoch_, _Folio_, _Harper’s_, _Hudson Review_, _Imagi_, _Kavita_, _The Kenyan Review_, _Times Literary Supplement_, _Massachusetts Review_, _National Review_, _New England Galaxy_, _New Poems by American Poets_, _New Ventures_, _New World Writing_, _New York Times Book Review_, _The New Yorker_, _Origin_, _Pennsylvania Literary Review_, _Poetry_, _Poetry Australia_, _Quarterly Review of Literature_, _Saturday Review_, _7 Arts_, _Transatlantic Review_. Acknowledgement is also made to The Lockwood Memorial Library, University of Buffalo, and The Yale University Library for access to their collections of Williams manuscripts. First published by New Directions, New York, 1962. First published in the United Kingdom, 1963. Printed in the United States of America. _=Contents=_ _Pictures from Brueghel_ 1 _The Desert Music_ 71 _Journey to Love_ 121 _Pictures from Brueghel_ “. . . the form of a man’s rattle may be in accordance with instructions received in the dream by which he obtained his power.” Frances Densmore _The Study of Indian Music_ _=Pictures from Brueghel=_ I SELF-PORTRAIT In a red winter hat blue eyes smiling just the head and shoulders crowded on the canvas arms folded one big ear the right showing the face slightly tilted a heavy wool coat with broad buttons gathered at the neck reveals a bulbous nose but the eyes red-rimmed from over-use he must have driven them hard but the delicate wrists show him to have been a man unused to manual labor unshaved his blond beard half trimmed no time for any- thing but his painting II LANDSCAPE WITH THE FALL OF ICARUS According to Brueghel when Icarus fell it was spring a farmer was ploughing his field the whole pageantry of the year was awake tingling near the edge of the sea concerned with itself sweating in the sun that melted the wings’ wax unsignificantly off the coast there was a splash quite unnoticed this was Icarus drowning III THE HUNTERS IN THE SNOW The over-all picture is winter icy mountains in the background the return from the hunt it is toward evening from the left sturdy hunters lead in their pack the inn-sign hanging from a broken hinge is a stag a crucifix between his antlers the cold inn yard is deserted but for a huge bonfire that flares wind-driven tended by women who cluster about it to the right beyond the hill is a pattern of skaters Brueghel the painter concerned with it all has chosen a winter-struck bush for his foreground to complete the picture . . IV THE ADORATION OF THE KINGS From the Nativity which I have already celebrated the Babe in its Mother’s arms the Wise Men in their stolen splendor and Joseph and the soldiery attendant with their incredulous faces make a scene copied we’ll say from the Italian masters but with a difference the mastery of the painting and the mind the resourceful mind that governed the whole the alert mind dissatisfied with what it is asked to and cannot do accepted the story and painted it in the brilliant colors of the chronicler the downcast eyes of the Virgin as a work of art for profound worship V PEASANT WEDDING Pour the wine bridegroom where before you the bride is enthroned her hair loose at her temples a head of ripe wheat is on the wall beside her the guests seated at long tables the bagpipers are ready there is a hound under the table the bearded Mayor is present women in their starched headgear are gabbing all but the bride hands folded in her lap is awkwardly silent simple dishes are being served clabber and what not from a trestle made of an unhinged barn door by two helpers one in a red coat a spoon in his hatband VI HAYMAKING The living quality of the man’s mind stands out and its covert assertions for art, art, art! painting that the Renaissance tried to absorb but it remained a wheat field over which the wind played men with scythes tumbling the wheat in rows the gleaners already busy it was his own— magpies the patient horses no one could take that from him VII THE CORN HARVEST Summer! the painting is organized about a young reaper enjoying his noonday rest completely relaxed from his morning labors sprawled in fact sleeping unbuttoned on his back the women have brought him his lunch perhaps a spot of wine they gather gossiping under a tree whose shade carelessly he does not share the resting center of their workaday world VIII THE WEDDING DANCE IN THE OPEN AIR Disciplined by the artist to go round & round in holiday gear a riotously gay rabble of peasants and their ample-bottomed doxies fills the market square featured by the women in their starched white headgear they prance or go openly toward the wood’s edges round and around in rough shoes and farm breeches mouths agape Oya! kicking up their heels IX THE PARABLE OF THE BLIND This horrible but superb painting the parable of the blind without a red in the composition shows a group of beggars leading each other diagonally downward across the canvas from one side to stumble finally into a bog where the picture and the composition ends back of which no seeing man is represented the unshaven features of the des- titute with their few pitiful possessions a basin to wash in a peasant cottage is seen and a church spire the faces are raised as toward the light there is no detail extraneous to the composition one follows the others stick in hand triumphant to disaster X CHILDREN’S GAMES I This is a schoolyard crowded with children of all ages near a village on a small stream meandering by where some boys are swimming bare-ass or climbing a tree in leaf everything is motion elder women are looking after the small fry a play wedding a christening nearby one leans hollering into an empty hogshead II Little girls whirling their skirts about until they stand out flat tops pinwheels to run in the wind with or a toy in 3 tiers to spin with a piece of twine to make it go blindman’s-buff follow the leader stilts high and low tipcat jacks bowls hanging by the knees standing on your head run the gauntlet a dozen on their backs feet together kicking through which a boy must pass roll the hoop or a construction made of bricks some mason has abandoned III The desperate toys of children their imagination equilibrium and rocks which are to be found everywhere and games to drag the other down blindfold to make use of a swinging weight with which at random to bash in the heads about them Brueghel saw it all and with his grim humor faithfully recorded it _=Exercise=_ Maybe it’s his wife the car is an official car belonging to a petty police officer I think but her get-up was far from official for that time of day _=Song=_ beauty is a shell from the sea where she rules triumphant till love has had its way with her scallops and lion’s paws sculptured to the tune of retreating waves undying accents repeated till the ear and the eye lie down together in the same bed _=The Woodthrush=_ fortunate man it is not too late the woodthrush flies into my garden before the snow he looks at me silent without moving his dappled breast reflecting tragic winter thoughts my love my own _=The Polar Bear=_ his coat resembles the snow deep snow the male snow which attacks and kills silently as it falls muffling the world to sleep that the interrupted quiet return to lie down with us its arms about our necks murderously a little while _=The Loving Dexterity=_ The flower fallen she saw it where it lay a pink petal intact deftly placed it on its stem again _=The Chrysanthemum=_ how shall we tell the bright petals from the sun in the sky concentrically crowding the branch save that it yields in its modesty to that splendor? _3 Stances_ I: ELAINE poised for the leap she is not yet ready for —save in her eyes her bare toes starting over the clipt lawn where she may not go emphasize summer and the curl of her blonde hair the tentative smile for the adult plans laid to trap her calves beginning to flex wrists set for the getaway II: ERICA the melody line is everything in this composition when I first witnessed your head and held it admiringly between my fingers I bowed my approval at the Scandinavian name they’d given you Erica after your father’s forebears the rest remains a mystery your snub nose spinning on the bridge of it points the way inward III: EMILY your long legs built to carry high the small head your grandfather knows if he knows anything gives the dance as your genius the cleft in your chin’s curl permitting may it carry you far _=Suzy=_ I women your age have decided wars and the beat of poems your grandfather is a poet and loves you pay attention to your lessons an inkling of what beauty means to a girl your age may dawn soon upon you II life is a flower when it opens you will look trembling into it unsure of what the traditional mirror may reveal between hope and despair while a timorous old man doubtfully half turns away his foolish head III a bunch of violets clutched in your idle hand gives him a place beside you which he cherishes his back turned from you casually appearing not to look he yearns after you protectively hopelessly wanting nothing I when you shall arrive as deep as you will need go to catch the blackfish the hook has been featly baited by the art you have and you do catch them II with what thoroughness you know seize that glistening body translated to that language you will understand gut clean roast garnish and III serve to yourself who better eat and enjoy however you divide and share that blackfish heft and shine is your own _=Fragment=_ as for him who finds fault may silliness and sorrow overtake him when you wrote you did not know the power of your words _=To a Woodpecker=_ December bird in the bare tree your harsh cry sounds reminding me of death we celebrated by lamen- tations crying out in the old days wails of anguish shrieking wakes curses that the gods had been so niggardly sweet nightingale of the winter woods hang out the snow as if it were gay curtains _=Song=_ I’d rather read an account of a hidden Carolina swamp where the white heron breeds protected from the hunters reached only across half-sunken logs a place difficult of access the females building their nests in the stifling heat the males in their mating splendor than to witness her broad pelvis making her awkward at the getaway . . . but I have forgot beauty that is no more than a sop when our time is spent and infirmities bring us to eat out of the same bowl! _=The Children=_ Once in a while we’d find a patch of yellow violets not many but blue big blue ones in the cemetery woods we’d pick bunches of them there was a family named Foltette a big family with lots of children’s graves so we’d take bunches of violets and place one on each headstone _=The Painting=_ Starting from black or finishing with it her defeat stands a delicate lock of blonde hair dictated by the Sorbonne this was her last clear act a portrait of a child to which she was indifferent beautifully drawn then she married and moved to another country _=The Stone Crock=_ In my hand I hold a postcard addressed to me by a lady Stoneware crock salt-glazed a dandelion embossed dark blue She selected it for me to admire casually in passing she was a Jewess intimate of a man I admired We often met in her studio and talked of him he loved the early art of this country blue stoneware stamped on the bulge of it Albany reminding me of him Now he is dead how gentle he was and persistent _=He Has Beaten about the Bush Long Enough=_ What a team Flossie, Mary, a chemistry prof and I make to confront the slowly hardening brain of an academician The most that can be said for it is that it has the crystal- line pattern of new ice on a country pool _=Iris=_ a burst of iris so that come down for breakfast we searched through the rooms for that sweetest odor and at first could not find its source then a blue as of the sea struck startling us from among those trumpeting petals _=Song=_ you are forever April to me the eternally unready forsythia a blonde straight- legged girl whom I myself ignorant as I was taught to read the poems my arms about your neck we clung together peril- ously more than a young girl should know a burst of frost nipped yellow flowers in the spring of the year _=The Dance=_ When the snow falls the flakes spin upon the long axis that concerns them most intimately two and two to make a dance the mind dances with itself, taking you by the hand, your lover follows there are always two, yourself and the other, the point of your shoe setting the pace, if you break away and run the dance is over Breathlessly you will take another partner better or worse who will keep at your side, at your stops whirls and glides until he too leaves off on his way down as if there were another direction gayer, more carefree spinning face to face but always down with each other secure only in each other’s arms But only the dance is sure! make it your own. Who can tell what is to come of it? in the woods of your own nature whatever twig interposes, and bare twigs have an actuality of their own this flurry of the storm that holds us, plays with us and discards us dancing, dancing as may be credible. _=Jersey Lyric=_ view of winter trees before one tree in the foreground where by fresh-fallen snow lie 6 woodchunks ready for the fire _=To the Ghost of Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings=_ To celebrate your brief life as you lived it grimly under attack as it happens to any common soldier black or white surrounded by the heavy scent of orange blossoms solitary in your low-lying farm among the young trees Wise and gentle-voiced old colored women attended you among the reeds and polonia with its blobs of purple flowers your pup smelling of skunk beside your grove-men lovesick maids and one friend of the same sex who knew how to handle a boat in a swamp Your quick trips to your New York publisher beating your brains out over the composition under the trees to the tune of a bull got loose gathering the fruit and preparing new fields to be put under the plough You lived nerves drawn tense beside dogtooth violets bougainvillaea swaying rushes and yellow jasmine that smells so sweet young and desperate as you were taking chances sometimes that you should be thrown from the saddle and get your neck broke as it must have happened and it did in the end _=To Be Recited to Flossie on Her Birthday=_ Let him who may among the continuing lines seek out that tortured constancy affirms where I persist let me say across cross purposes that the flower bloomed struggling to assert itself simply under the conflicting lights you will believe me a rose to the end of time _=Metric Figure=_ gotta hold your nose with the appropriate gesture smiling back of the garbage truck as the complex city passes to the confession or psychiatric couch or booth _=The Intelligent Sheepman and the New Cars=_ I’d like to pull the back out and use one of them to take my “girls” to the fairs in _=The Italian Garden=_ When she married years ago her romantic ideas dominated the builders nightingale and hermit thrush then the garden fell into disuse. Now her son has taken up her old ideas formally shut out by high walls from the sheep run. It is a scene from Comus transported to upper New York State. I remember it already ruined in early May the trees crowded with orioles chickadees robins brown-thrashers cardinals in their scarlet coats vocal at dawn among pools reft of their lilies and rarer plants flowers given instead to mallows pampas-grass and cattails by drought and winter winds where now hummingbirds touch without touching. Moss-covered benches fallen apart among sunken gardens where The Faerie Queene was read to strains from Campion and the scent of wild strawberries mingled with that of eglantine and verbena. Courtesy has revived with visitors who have begun to stroll the paths as in the quattrocentro covertly. Maybe it will drive them to be more civil love more jocosely (a good word) as we presume they did in that famous garden where Boccaccio and his friends hid themselves from the plague and rude manners in the woods of that garden as we would similarly today to escape the plague of our cars which cannot penetrate hers. _=Poem=_ The rose fades and is renewed again by its seed, naturally but where save in the poem shall it go to suffer no diminution of its splendor _=A Formal Design=_ This fleur-de-lis at a fence rail where a unicorn is confined it is a tapestry deftly woven a milleflor design the fleur-de-lis with its yellow petals edges a fruiting tree formally enough in this climate a pomegranate to which a princely collar round his arching neck the beast is lightly tethered _=Bird=_ Bird with outstretched wings poised inviolate unreaching yet reaching your image this November planes to a stop miraculously fixed in my arresting eyes _=The Gossips=_ Blocking the sidewalk so we had to go round 3 carefully coiffured and perfumed old men fresh from the barbers a cartoon by Daumier reflecting the times were discussing with a foreign accent one cupping his ears not to miss a syllable the news from Russia on a view of the reverse surface of the moon . . _=Exercise No. 2=_ The metal smokestack of my neighbor’s chimney greets me among the new leaves it is a small house adjacent to my bigger one I have come in 3 years to know much of her an old lady as I am an old man we greet each other across the hedge my wife gives her flowers we have never visited each other _=The World Contracted to a Recognizable Image=_ at the small end of an illness there was a picture probably Japanese which filled my eye an idiotic picture except it was all I recognized the wall lived for me in that picture I clung to it as to a fly _=The Fruit=_ Waking I was eating pears! she said I sat beside her on the bed thinking of Picasso a portrait of a sensitive young boy gathered into himself Waking I was eating pears! she said when separate jointly we embraced _=Short Poem=_ You slapped my face oh but so gently I smiled at the caress _=Poem=_ on getting a card long delayed from a poet whom I love but with whom I differ touching the modern poetic technique I was much moved to hear from him if as yet he does not concede the point nor is he indeed conscious of it no matter his style has other outstanding virtues which delight me _=To Flossie=_ who showed me a bunch of garden roses she was keeping on ice against an appointment with friends for supper day after tomorrow aren’t they beautiful you can’t smell them because they’re so cold but aren’t they in wax paper for the moment beautiful _=Portrait of a Woman at Her Bath=_ it is a satisfaction a joy to have one of those in the house when she takes a bath she unclothes herself she is no Venus I laugh at her an Inca shivering at the well the sun is glad of a fellow to marvel at the birds and the flowers look in _=Some Simple Measures in the American Idiom and the Variable Foot=_ I: EXERCISE IN TIMING Oh the sumac died it’s the first time I noticed it II: HISTOLOGY There is the microscopic anatomy of the whale this is reassuring III: PERPETUUM MOBILE To all the girls of all ages who walk up and down on the streets of this town silent or gabbing putting their feet down one before the other one two one two they pause sometimes before a store window and reform the line from here to China everywhere back and forth and back and forth and back and forth IV: THE BLUE JAY It crouched just before the take-off caught in the cinematograph— in motion of the mind wings just set to spread a flash a blue curse a memory of you my friend shrieked at me —serving art as usual V: THE EXISTENTIALIST’S WIFE I used to follow the seasons in this semi-northern climate and the warblers that come in May knew the parula from the myrtle when I found it dead on the lawn there is no season but the one for me now VI: A SALAD FOR THE SOUL My pleasant soul we may not be destined to survive our guts let’s celebrate what we eject sometimes with greatest fervor I hear it also from the ladies’ room what ho! the source of all delicious salads VII: CHLOE The calves of the young girls legs when they are well made knees lithely built in their summer clothes show them predisposed toward flight or the dance the magenta flower of the moth-mullen balanced idly tilting her weight from one foot to the other shifting to avoid looking at me on my way to mail a letter smiling to a friend VIII: THE COCKTAIL PARTY A young woman on whose belly I have never slept though others have met today at a cocktail party not drunk but by love ignoring the others we looked in each other’s eyes eyes alert to what we were saying eyes blinded breathless by that alone IX: THE STOLEN PEONIES What I got out of women was difficult to assess Flossie not you you lived with me many years you remember that year we had the magnificent stand of peonies how happy we were with them but one night they were stolen we shared the loss together thinking of nothing else for a whole day nothing could have brought us closer we had been married ten years _=The High Bridge above the Tagus River at Toledo=_ A young man, alone, on the high bridge over the Tagus which was too narrow to allow the sheep driven by the lean, enormous dogs whose hind legs worked slowly on cogs to pass easily . . . (he didn’t speak the language) Pressed against the parapet either side by the crowding sheep, the relentless pressure of the dogs communicated itself to him also above the waters in the gorge below. They were hounds to him rather than sheep dogs because of their size and savage appearance, dog tired from the day’s work. The stiff jerking movement of the hind legs, the hanging heads at the shepherd’s heels, slowly followed the excited and crowding sheep. The whole flock, the shepherd and the dogs, were covered with dust as if they had been all day long on the road. The pace of the sheep, slow in the mass, governed the man and the dogs. They were approaching the city at nightfall, the long journey completed. In old age they walk in the old man’s dreams and still walk in his dreams, peacefully continuing in his verse forever. _=15 Years Later=_ on seeing my own play _Many Loves_ on the stage for the first time I recall many a passage of the original con- versations with my patients, especially the women, myself the interlocutor laying myself bare for them all there in the play but who will take the trouble to evaluate the serious aspects of the case? One of the actors by dint of learning the lines by heart has come to me his face aglow openmouthed a light in his eyes Nothing more _=The Title=_ —as in Gauguin’s _The Loss of Virginity_— how inessential it is to the composition: the nude body, unattended save by a watchful hound, forepaw against the naked breast, there she lies on her back in an open field, limbs quietly assembled—yet how by its very unrelatedness it enhances the impact and emotional dignity of the whole . . . _=Mounted as an Amazon=_ She rides her hips as it were a horse such women tickle me a pat answer to philosophy or high heels would put them on their cans if fol- lowed up most women are more pliant come of a far different race _=The Snow Begins=_ A rain of bombs, well placed, is no less lovely but this comes gently over all all crevices are covered the stalks of fallen flowers vanish before this benefice all the garden’s wounds are healed white, white, white as death fallen which dignifies it as no violence ever can gently and silently in the night. _=Calypsos=_ I Well God is love so love me God is love so love me God is love so love me well II Love the sun comes up in the morning and in the evening zippy zappy it goes III We watched a red rooster with two hens back of the museum at St. Croix flap his wings zippy zappy and crow _=An Exercise=_ Sick as I am confused in the head I mean I have endured this April so far visiting friends returning home late at night I saw a huge Negro a dirty collar about his enormous neck appeared to be choking him I did not know whether or not he saw me though he was sitting directly before me how shall we escape this modern age and learn to breathe again _=Three Nahuatl Poems=_ One by one I proclaim your songs: I bind them on, gold crabs, as if they were anklets: like emeralds I gather them. Clothe yourself in them: they are your riches. Bathe in feathers of the quetzal, your treasury of birds’ plumes, black and yellow, the red feathers of the macaw beat your drums about the world: deck yourself out in them: they are your riches. Where am I to go, whither? The road’s there, the road to Two-Gods. Well, who checks men here, here where all lack a body, at the bottom of the sky? Or, maybe, it is only on Earth that we lose the body? Cleaned out, rid of it completely, His House: there remains none on this earth! Who is it that said: Where find them? our friends no longer exist! Will he return will Prince Cuautli ever return? Will Ayocuan, the one who drove an arrow into the sky? Shall these two yet gladden you? Events don’t recur: we vanish once only. Hence the cause of my weeping: Prince Ayocuan, warrior chief governed us harshly. His pride waxed more, he grew haughty here among men. But his time is finished . . . he can no longer come to bow down before Father and Mother. . . . This is the reason for my weeping: He has fled to the place where all lack a body. _=Sonnet in Search of an Author=_ Nude bodies like peeled logs sometimes give off a sweetest odor, man and woman under the trees in full excess matching the cushion of aromatic pine-drift fallen threaded with trailing woodbine a sonnet might be made of it Might be made of it! odor of excess odor of pine needles, odor of peeled logs, odor of no odor other than trailing woodbine that has no odor, odor of a nude woman sometimes, odor of a man. _=The Gift=_ As the wise men of old brought gifts guided by a star to the humble birthplace of the god of love, the devils as an old print shows retreated in confusion. What could a baby know of gold ornaments or frankincense and myrrh, of priestly robes and devout genuflections? But the imagination knows all stories before they are told and knows the truth of this one past all defection The rich gifts so unsuitable for a child though devoutly preferred, stood for all that love can bring. The men were old how could they know of a mother’s needs or a child’s appetite? But as they kneeled the child was fed. They saw it and gave praise! A miracle had taken place, hard gold to love, a mother’s milk! before their wondering eyes. The ass brayed the cattle lowed. It was their nature. All men by their nature give praise. It is all they can do. The very devils by their flight give praise. What is death, beside this? Nothing. The wise men came with gifts and bowed down to worship this perfection. _=The Turtle=_ (_For My Grandson_) Not because of his eyes, the eyes of a bird, but because he is beaked, birdlike, to do an injury, has the turtle attracted you. He is your only pet. When we are together you talk of nothing else ascribing all sorts of murderous motives to his least action. You ask me to write a poem, should I have poems to write, about a turtle. The turtle lives in the mud but is not mud-like, you can tell it by his eyes which are clear. When he shall escape his present confinement he will stride about the world destroying all with his sharp beak. Whatever opposes him in the streets of the city shall go down. Cars will be overturned. And upon his back shall ride, to his conquests, my Lord, you! You shall be master! In the beginning there was a great tortoise who supported the world. Upon him all ultimately rests. Without him nothing will stand. He is all wise and can outrun the hare. In the night his eyes carry him to unknown places. He is your friend. _=Sappho, Be Comforted=_ There is only one love let it be a sparrow to hold between the breasts greets us daily with its small cries what does it matter? I, we’ll say, love a woman but truth to tell I love myself more. Sappho loves the music of her own songs which men seldom mean to her, a lovely girl of whom she is desperately fond: This is myself though my hateful mirror shows every day my big nose. Men are indifferent to me, my sweet but I would not trade my skill in composition for all, a second choice, you present for my passionate caresses. _=To My Friend Ezra Pound=_ or he were a Jew or a Welshman I hope they do give you the Nobel Prize it would serve you right —in perpetuity with such a name If I were a dog I’d sit down on a cold pavement in the rain to wait for a friend (and so would you) if it so pleased me even if it were January or Zukofsky Your English is not specific enough As a writer of poems you show yourself to be inept not to say usurious _=Tapiola=_ He is no more dead than Finland herself is dead under the blows of the mass-man who threatened to destroy her until she felled her forests about his head, ensnaring him. But, children, you underestimated the power in your own song, _Finlandia_! It holds you up but no more so than has he I celebrate who had heard the icy wind in his ears and defied it lovingly with a smile. The power of music, of composition, the placing of sounds together, edge against edge, Musorgski the half-mad Russian had it and Dostoevski who knew the soul. In such style whistled the winds grateful to be tamed, we say, by a man. Whee-wow! You stayed up half the night in your attic room under the eaves, composing secretly, setting it down, period after period, as the wind whistled. Lightning flashed! The roof creaked about your ears threatening to give way! But you had a composition to finish that could not wait. The storm entered your mind where all good things are secured, written down, for love’s sake and to defy the devil of emptiness. The children are decked out in ribbons, bunting and with flags in their hands to celebrate your birthday! They parade to music! a joyous occasion. Sibelius has been born and continues to live in all our minds, all of us, forever. . . . _=Poem=_ The plastic surgeon who has concerned himself with the repair of the mole on my ear could not be more pointedly employed let all men confess it Gauguin or Van Gogh were intimates who fell out finally and parted going to the ends of the earth to be apart, wild men one of them cut his ear off with a pair of shears which made him none the less a surpassing genius this happened yesterday forgive him he was mad and who among us has retained his sanity or balance in the course the events have taken since those days _=Heel & Toe to the End=_ Gagarin says, in ecstasy, he could have gone on forever he floated ate and sang and when he emerged from that one hundred eight minutes off the surface of the earth he was smiling Then he returned to take his place among the rest of us from all that division and subtraction a measure toe and heel heel and toe he felt as if he had been dancing _=The Rewaking=_ Sooner or later we must come to the end of striving to re-establish the image the image of the rose but not yet you say extending the time indefinitely by your love until a whole spring rekindle the violet to the very lady’s-slipper and so by your love the very sun itself is revived _The Desert Music and Other Poems_ (_1954_) _To Bill and Paul_ _=The Descent=_ The descent beckons as the ascent beckoned. Memory is a kind of accomplishment, a sort of renewal even an initiation, since the spaces it opens are new places inhabited by hordes heretofore unrealized, of new kinds— since their movements are toward new objectives (even though formerly they were abandoned). No defeat is made up entirely of defeat—since the world it opens is always a place formerly unsuspected. A world lost, a world unsuspected, beckons to new places and no whiteness (lost) is so white as the memory of whiteness . With evening, love wakens though its shadows which are alive by reason of the sun shining— grow sleepy now and drop away from desire . Love without shadows stirs now beginning to awaken as night advances. The descent made up of despairs and without accomplishment realizes a new awakening: which is a reversal of despair. For what we cannot accomplish, what is denied to love, what we have lost in the anticipation— a descent follows, endless and indestructible . _=To Daphne and Virginia=_ The smell of the heat is boxwood when rousing us a movement of the air stirs our thoughts that had no life in them to a life, a life in which two women agonize: to live and to breathe is no less. Two young women. The box odor is the odor of that of which partaking separately, each to herself I partake also . . separately. Be patient that I address you in a poem, there is no other fit medium. The mind lives there. It is uncertain, can trick us and leave us agonized. But for resources what can equal it? There is nothing. We should be lost without its wings to fly off upon. The mind is the cause of our distresses but of it we can build anew. Oh something more than it flies off to: a woman’s world, of crossed sticks, stopping thought. A new world is only a new mind. And the mind and the poem are all apiece. Two young women to be snared, odor of box, to bind and hold them for the mind’s labors. All women are fated similarly facing men and there is always another, such as I, who loves them, loves all women, but finds himself, touching them, like other men, often confused. I have two sons, the husbands of these women, who live also in a world of love, apart. Shall this odor of box in the heat not also touch them fronting a world of women from which they are debarred by the very scents which draw them on against easy access? In our family we stammer unless, half mad, we come to speech at last And I am not a young man. My love encumbers me. It is a love less than a young man’s love but, like this box odor more penetrant, infinitely more penetrant, in that sense not to be resisted. There is, in the hard give and take of a man’s life with a woman a thing which is not the stress itself but beyond and above that, something that wants to rise and shake itself free. We are not chickadees on a bare limb with a worm in the mouth. The worm is in our brains and concerns them and not food for our offspring, wants to disrupt our thought and throw it to the newspapers or anywhere. There is, in short, a counter stress, born of the sexual shock, which survives it consonant with the moon, to keep its own mind. There is, of course, more. Women are not alone in that. At least while this healing odor is abroad one can write a poem. * * * * * Staying here in the country on an old farm we eat our breakfasts on a balcony under an elm. The shrubs below us are neglected. And there, penned in, or he would eat the garden, lives a pet goose who tilts his head sidewise and looks up at us, a very quiet old fellow who writes no poems. Fine mornings we sit there while birds come and go. A pair of robins is building a nest . for the second time this season. Men against their reason speak of love, sometimes, when they are old. It is all they can do . or watch a heavy goose who waddles, slopping noisily in the mud of his pool. _=The Orchestra=_ The precise counterpart of a cacophony of bird calls lifting the sun almighty into his sphere: wood-winds clarinet and violins sound a prolonged A! Ah! the sun, the sun! is about to rise and shed his beams as he has always done upon us all, drudges and those who live at ease, women and men, upon the old, upon children and the sick who are about to die and are indeed dead in their beds, to whom his light is forever lost. The cello raises his bass note manfully in the treble din: Ah, ah and ah! together, unattuned seeking a common tone. Love is that common tone shall raise his fiery head and sound his note. The purpose of an orchestra is to organize those sounds and hold them to an assembled order . in spite of the “wrong note.” Well, shall we think or listen? Is there a sound addressed not wholly to the ear? We half close our eyes. We do not hear it through our eyes. It is not a flute note either, it is the relation of a flute note to a drum. I am wide awake. The mind is listening. The ear is alerted. But the ear in a half-reluctant mood stretches . and yawns. And so the banked violins in three tiers enliven the scene, pizzicato. For a short memory or to make the listener listen the theme is repeated stressing a variant: it is a principle of music to repeat the theme. Repeat and repeat again, as the pace mounts. The theme is difficult . but no more difficult than the facts to be resolved. Repeat and repeat the theme and all it develops to be until thought is dissolved in tears. Our dreams have been assaulted by a memory that will not sleep. The French horns interpose . their voices: I love you. My heart is innocent. And this the first day of the world! Say to them: “Man has survived hitherto because he was too ignorant to know how to realize his wishes. Now that he can realize them, he must either change them or perish.” Now is the time . in spite of the “wrong note” I love you. My heart is innocent. And this the first (and last) day of the world The birds twitter now anew but a design surmounts their twittering. It is a design of a man that makes them twitter. It is a design. _=For Eleanor and Bill Monahan=_ Mother of God! Our Lady! the heart is an unruly Master: Forgive us our sins as we forgive those who have sinned against us. We submit ourselves to Your rule as the flowers in May submit themselves to Your Holy rule—against that impossible springtime when men shall be the flowers spread at your feet. As far as spring is from winter so are we from you now. We have not come easily to your environs but painfully across sands that have scored our feet. That which we have suffered was for us to suffer. Now, in the winter of the year, the birds who know how to escape suffering by flight are gone. Man alone is that creature who cannot escape suffering by flight . I do not come to you save that I confess to being half man and half woman. I have seen the ivy cling to a piece of crumbled wall so that you cannot tell by which either stands: this is to say if she to whom I cling is loosened both of us go down. Mother of God I have seen you stoop to a merest flower and raise it and press it to your cheek. I could have called out joyfully but you were too far off. You are a woman and it was a woman’s gesture. You have no lovers now in the bare skies to bring you flowers, to whisper to you under a hedge howbeit you are young and fit to be loved. I declare it boldly with my heart in my teeth and my knees knocking together. Yet I declare it, and by God’s word it is no lie. Make us humble and obedient to His rule. There are men who as they live fling caution to the wind and women praise them and love them for it. Cruel as the claws of a cat . . The moon which they have vulgarized recently is still your planet as it was Dian’s before you. What do they think they will attain by their ships that death has not already given them? Their ships should be directed inward upon . But I am an old man. I have had enough. The female principle of the world is my appeal in the extremity to which I have come. _O clemens! O pia! O dolcis!_ _Maria!_ _=To a Dog Injured in the Street=_ It is myself, not the poor beast lying there yelping with pain that brings me to myself with a start— as at the explosion of a bomb, a bomb that has laid all the world waste. I can do nothing but sing about it and so I am assuaged from my pain. A drowsy numbness drowns my sense as if of hemlock I had drunk. I think of the poetry of René Char and all he must have seen and suffered that has brought him to speak only of sedgy rivers, of daffodils and tulips whose roots they water, even to the free-flowing river that laves the rootlets of those sweet-scented flowers that people the milky way . I remember Norma our English setter of my childhood her silky ears and expressive eyes. She had a litter of pups one night in our pantry and I kicked one of them thinking, in my alarm, that they were biting her breasts to destroy her. I remember also a dead rabbit lying harmlessly on the outspread palm of a hunter’s hand. As I stood by watching he took a hunting knife and with a laugh thrust it up into the animal’s private parts. I almost fainted. Why should I think of that now? The cries of a dying dog are to be blotted out as best I can. René Char you are a poet who believes in the power of beauty to right all wrongs. I believe it also. With invention and courage we shall surpass the pitiful dumb beasts, let all men believe it, as you have taught me also to believe it. _=The Yellow Flower=_ What shall I say, because talk I must? That I have found a cure for the sick? I have found no cure for the sick . but this crooked flower which only to look upon all men are cured. This is that flower for which all men sing secretly their hymns of praise. This is that sacred flower! Can this be so? A flower so crooked and obscure? It is a mustard flower and not a mustard flower, a single spray topping the deformed stem of fleshy leaves in this freezing weather under glass. An ungainly flower and an unnatural one, in this climate; what can be the reason that it has picked me out to hold me, openmouthed, rooted before this window in the cold, my will drained from me so that I have only eyes for these yellow, twisted petals ? That the sight, though strange to me, must be a common one, is clear: there are such flowers with such leaves native to some climate which they can call their own. But why the torture and the escape through the flower? It is as if Michelangelo had conceived the subject of his _Slaves_ from this —or might have done so. And did he not make the marble bloom? I am sad as he was sad in his heroic mood. But also I have eyes that are made to see and if they see ruin for myself and all that I hold dear, they see also through the eyes and through the lips and tongue the power to free myself and speak of it, as Michelangelo through his hands had the same, if greater, power. Which leaves, to account for, the tortured bodies of the slaves themselves and the tortured body of my flower which is not a mustard flower at all but some unrecognized and unearthly flower for me to naturalize and acclimate and choose it for my own. _=The Host=_ According to their need, this tall Negro evangelist (at a table separate from the rest of his party); these two young Irish nuns (to be described subsequently); and this white-haired Anglican have come witlessly to partake of the host laid for them (and for me) by the tired waitresses. It is all (since eat we must) made sacred by our common need. The evangelist’s assistants are most open in their praise though covert as would be seemly in such a public place. The nuns are all black, a side view. The cleric, his head bowed to reveal his unruly poll dines alone. My eyes are restless. The evangelists eat well, fried oysters and what not at this railway restaurant. The Sisters are soon satisfied. One on leaving, looking straight before her under steadfast brows, reveals blue eyes. I myself have brown eyes and a milder mouth. There is nothing to eat, seek it where you will, but of the body of the Lord. The blessed plants and the sea, yield it to the imagination intact. And by that force it becomes real, bitterly to the poor animals who suffer and die that we may live. The well-fed evangels, the narrow-lipped and bright-eyed nuns, the tall, white-haired Anglican, proclaim it by their appetites as do I also, chomping with my worn-out teeth: the Lord is my shepherd I shall not want. No matter how well they are fed, how daintily they put the food to their lips, it is all according to the imagination! Only the imagination is real! They have imagined it, therefore it is so: of the evangels, with the long legs characteristic of the race— only the docile women of the party smiled at me when, with my eyes I accosted them. The nuns—but after all I saw only a face, a young face cut off at the brows. It was a simple story. The cleric, plainly from a good school, interested me more, a man with whom I might carry on a conversation. No one was there save only for the food. Which I alone, being a poet, could have given them. But I had only my eyes with which to speak. _=Deep Religious Faith=_ Past death past rainy days or the distraction of lady’s-smocks all silver-white; beyond the remote borders of poetry itself if it does not drive us, it is vain. Yet it is that which made El Greco paint his green and distorted saints and live lean. It is what in life drives us to praise music and the old or sit by a friend in his last hours. All that which makes the pear ripen or the poet’s line come true! Invention is the heart of it. Without the quirks and oddnesses of invention the paralytic is confirmed in his paralysis, it is from a northern and half-savage country where the religion is hate. There the citizens are imprisoned. The rose may not be worshipped or the poet look to it for benefit. In the night a storm of gale proportions came up. No one was there to envisage a field of daisies! There were bellowings and roarings from a child’s book of fairy tales, the rumble of a distant bombing —or of a bee! Shame on our poets, they have caught the prevalent fever: impressed by the “laboratory,” they have forgot the flower! which goes beyond all laboratories! They have quit the job of invention. The imagination has fallen asleep in a poppy-cup. _=The Mental Hospital Garden=_ It is far to Assisi, but not too far: Over this garden, brooding over this garden, there is a kindly spirit, brother to the poor and who is poorer than he who is in love when birds are nesting in the spring of the year? They came to eat from his hand who had nothing, and yet from his plenty he fed them all. All mankind grew to be his debtors, a simple story. Love is in season. At such a time, hyacinth time in the hospital garden, the time of the coral-flowered and early salmon-pink clusters, it is the time also of abandoned birds’ nests before the sparrows start to tear them apart against the advent of that bounty from which they will build anew. All about them on the lawns the young couples embrace . as in a tale by Boccaccio. They are careless under license of the disease which has restricted them to these grounds. St. Francis forgive them and all lovers whoever they may be. They have seen a great light, it springs from their own bawdy foreheads. The light is sequestered there by these enclosing walls. They are divided from their fellows. It is a bounty from a last year’s bird’s nest. St. Francis, who befriended the wild birds, by their aid, those who have nothing and live by the Holy light of love that rules, blocking despair, over this garden. Time passes. The pace has slackened But with the falling off of the pace the scene has altered. The lovers raise their heads, at that which has come over them. It is summer now. The broad sun shines! Blinded by the light they walk bewildered, seeking between the leaves for a vantage from which to view the advancing season. They are incredulous of their own cure and half minded to escape into the dark again. The scene indeed has changed. By St. Francis the whole scene has changed. They glimpse a surrounding sky and the whole countryside. Filled with terror they seek a familiar flower at which to warm themselves, but the whole field accosts them. They hide their eyes ashamed before that bounty, peering through their fingers timidly. The saint is watching, his eyes filled with pity. The year is still young but not so young as they who face the fears with which they are confronted. Reawakened after love’s first folly they resemble children roused from a long sleep. Summer is here, right enough. The saint has tactfully withdrawn. One emboldened, parting the leaves before her, stands in the full sunlight, alone shading her eyes as her heart beats wildly and her mind drinks up the full meaning of it all! _=The Artist=_ Mr. T. bareheaded in a soiled undershirt his hair standing out on all sides stood on his toes heels together arms gracefully for the moment curled above his head. Then he whirled about bounded into the air and with an _entrechat_ perfectly achieved completed the figure. My mother taken by surprise where she sat in her invalid’s chair was left speechless. Bravo! she cried at last and clapped her hands. The man’s wife came from the kitchen: What goes on here? she said. But the show was over. _=Theocritus: Idyl I=_ _A Version from the Greek_ THYRSIS The whisper of the wind in that pine tree, goatherd, is sweet as the murmur of live water; likewise your flute notes. After Pan you shall bear away second prize. And if he take the goat with the horns, the she-goat is yours: but if he choose the she-goat, the kid will fall to your lot. And the flesh of the kid is dainty before they begin milking them. GOATHERD Your song is sweeter, shepherd, than the music of the water as it plashes from the high face of yonder rock! If the Muses choose the young ewe you shall receive a stall-fed lamb as your reward, but if they prefer the lamb you shall have the ewe for second prize. THYRSIS Will you not, goatherd, in the Nymph’s name take your place on this sloping knoll among the tamarisks and pipe for me while I tend my sheep. GOATHERD No, shepherd, nothing doing; it’s not for us to be heard during the noon hush. We dread Pan, who for a fact is stretched out somewhere, dog tired from the chase; his mood is bitter, anger ready at his nostrils. But, Thyrsis, since you are good at singing of _The Afflictions of Daphnis_, and have most deeply meditated the pastoral mode, come here, let us sit down, under this elm facing Priapus and the fountain fairies, here where the shepherds come to try themselves out by the oak trees. Ah! may you sing as you sang that day facing Chromis out of Libya, I will let you milk, yes, three times over, a goat that is the mother of twins and even when she has sucked her kids her milk fills two pails. I will give besides, new made, a two-eared bowl of ivy-wood, rubbed with beeswax that smacks still of the knife of the carver. Round its upper edges winds the ivy, ivy flecked with yellow flowers and about it is twisted a tendril joyful with the saffron fruit. Within, is limned a girl, as fair a thing as the gods have made, dressed in a sweeping gown. Her hair is confined by a snood. Beside her two fair-haired youths with alternate speech are contending but her heart is untouched. Now, she glances at one, smiling, and now, lightly she flings the other a thought, while their eyes, by reason of love’s long vigils, are heavy but their labors all in vain. In addition there is fashioned there an ancient fisherman and a rock, a rugged rock, on which with might and main the old man poises a great net for the cast as one who puts his whole heart into it. One would say that he was fishing with the full strength of his limbs so big do his muscles stand out about the neck. Gray-haired though he be, he has the strength of a young man. Now, separated from the sea-broken old man by a narrow interval is a vineyard, heavy with fire-red clusters, and on a rude wall sits a small boy guarding them. Round him two she-foxes are skulking. One goes the length of the vine-rows to eat the grapes while the other brings all her cunning to bear, by what has been set down, vowing she will never quit the lad until she leaves him bare and breakfastless. But the boy is plaiting a pretty cage of locust stalks and asphodel, fitting in the reeds and cares less for his scrip and the vines than he takes delight in his plaiting. All about the cup is draped the mild acanthus a miracle of varied work, a thing for you to marvel at. I paid a Caledonian ferryman a goat and a great white cream-cheese for the bowl. It is still virgin to me, its lip has never touched mine. To gain my desire, I would gladly give this cup if you, my friend, will sing for me that delightful song. I hold nothing back. Begin, my friend, for you cannot, you may be sure, take your song, which drives all things out of mind, with you to the other world. _=The Desert Music=_ —the dance begins: to end about a form propped motionless—on the bridge between Juárez and El Paso—unrecognizable in the semi-dark Wait! The others waited while you inspected it, on the very walk itself . Is it alive? —neither a head, legs nor arms! It isn’t a sack of rags someone has abandoned here . torpid against the flange of the supporting girder . ? an inhuman shapelessness, knees hugged tight up into the belly Egg-shaped! What a place to sleep! on the International Boundary. Where else, interjurisdictional, not to be disturbed? How shall we get said what must be said? Only the poem. Only the counted poem, to an exact measure: to imitate, not to copy nature, not to copy nature not, prostrate, to copy nature but a dance! to dance two and two with him— sequestered there asleep, right end up! A music supersedes his composure, hallooing to us across a great distance . . wakens the dance who blows upon his benumbed fingers! Only the poem only the made poem, to get said what must be said, not to copy nature, sticks in our throats . The law? The law gives us nothing but a corpse, wrapped in a dirty mantle. The law is based on murder and confinement, long delayed, but this, following the insensate music, is based on the dance: an agony of self-realization bound into a whole by that which surrounds us . I cannot escape I cannot vomit it up Only the poem! Only the made poem, the verb calls it into being. —it looks too small for a man. A woman. Or a very shriveled old man. Maybe dead. They probably inspect the place and will cart it away later . Heave it into the river. A good thing. Leaving California to return east, the fertile desert, (were it to get water) surrounded us, a music of survival, subdued, distant, half heard; we were engulfed by it as in the early evening, seeing the wind lift and drive the sand, we passed Yuma. All night long, heading for El Paso to meet our friend, we slept fitfully. Thinking of Paris, I waked to the tick of the rails. The jagged desert . —to tell what subsequently I saw and what heard —to place myself (in my nature) beside nature —to imitate nature (for to copy nature would be a shameful thing) I lay myself down: The Old Market’s a good place to begin: Let’s cut through here— tequila’s only a nickel a slug in these side streets. Keep out though. Oh, it’s all right at this time of day but I saw H. terribly beaten up in one of those joints. He asked for it. I thought he was going to be killed. I do my drinking on the main drag . That’s the bull ring Oh, said Floss, after she got used to the change of light . What color! Isn’t it wonderful! —paper flowers (_para los santos_) baked red-clay utensils, daubed with blue, silverware, dried peppers, onions, print goods, children’s clothing . the place deserted all but for a few Indians squatted in the booths, unnoticing (don’t you think it) as though they slept there . There’s a second tier. Do you want to go up? What makes Texans so tall? We saw a woman this morning in a mink cape six feet if she was an inch. What a woman! Probably a Broadway figure. —tell you what else we saw: about a million sparrows screaming their heads off in the trees of that small park where the buses stop, sanctuary, I suppose, from the wind driving the sand in that way about the city . Texas rain they call it —and those two alligators in the fountain . There were four I saw only two They were looking right at you all the time . Penny please! Give me penny please, mister. Don’t give them anything. . instinctively one has already drawn one’s naked wrist away from those obscene fingers as in the mind a vague apprehension speaks and the music rouses . Let’s get in here. a music! cut off as the bar door closes behind us. We’ve got another half hour. —returned to the street, the pressure moves from booth to booth along the curb. Opposite, no less insistent the better stores are wide open. Come in and look around. You don’t have to buy: hats, riding boots, blankets . Look at the way, slung from her neck with a shawl, that young Indian woman carries her baby! —a stream of Spanish, as she brushes by, intense, wide- eyed in eager talk with her boy husband —three half-grown girls, one of them eating a pomegranate. Laughing. and the serious tourist, man and wife, middle-aged, middle-western, their arms loaded with loot, whispering together—still looking for bargains . and the aniline red and green candy at the little booth tended by the old Indian woman. Do you suppose anyone actually buys—and eats the stuff? My feet are beginning to ache me. We still got a few minutes. Let’s try here. They had the mayor up last month for taking $3000 a week from the whorehouses of the city. Not much left for the girls. There’s a show on. Only a few tables occupied. A conventional orchestra—this place livens up later—playing the usual local jing-a-jing—a boy and girl team, she confidential with someone off stage. Laughing: just finishing the act. So we drink until the next turn—a strip tease. Do you mean it? Wow! Look at her. You’d have to be pretty drunk to get any kick out of that. She’s no Mexican. Some worn-out trouper from the States. Look at those breasts . There is a fascination seeing her shake the beaded sequins from a string about her hips She gyrates but it’s not what you think, one does not laugh to watch her belly. One is moved but not at the dull show. The guitarist yawns. She cannot even sing. She has about her painted hardihood a screen of pretty doves which flutter their wings. Her cold eyes perfunc- torily moan but do not smile. Yet they bill and coo by grace of a certain candor. She is heavy on her feet. That’s good. She bends forward leaning on the table of the balding man sitting upright, alone, so that everything hangs for- ward. What the hell are you grinning to yourself about? Not at _her_? The music! I like her. She fits the music . Why don’t these Indians get over this nauseating prattle about their souls and their loves and sing us something else for a change? This place is rank with it. She at least knows she’s part of another tune, knows her customers, has the same opinion of them as I have. That gives her one up . one up following the lying music . There is another music. The bright-colored candy of her nakedness lifts her unexpectedly to partake of its tune . Andromeda of those rocks, the virgin of her mind . those unearthly greens and reds in her mockery of virtue she becomes unaccountably virtuous . though she in no way pretends it . Let’s get out of this. In the street it hit me in the face as we started to walk again. Or am I merely playing the poet? Do I merely invent it out of whole cloth? I thought . What in the form of an old whore in a cheap Mexican joint in Juárez, her bare can waggling crazily can be so refreshing to me, raise to my ear so sweet a tune, built of such slime? Here we are. They’ll be along any minute. The bar is at the right of the entrance, a few tables opposite which you have to pass to get to the dining room, beyond. A foursome, two oversize Americans, no longer young, got up as cowboys, hats and all, are drunk and carrying on with their gals, drunk also, especially one inciting her man, the biggest, _Yip ee!_ to dance in the narrow space, oblivious to everything —she is insatiable and he is trying stumblingly to keep up with her. Give it the gun, pardner! _Yip ee!_ We pushed by them to our table, seven of us. Seated about the room were quiet family groups, some with children, eating. Rather a better class than you notice on the streets. So here we are. You can see through into the kitchen where one of the cooks, his shirt sleeves rolled up, an apron over the well-pressed pants of a street suit, black hair neatly parted, a tall good-looking man, is working absorbed, before a chopping block Old fashioneds all around? So this is William Carlos Williams, the poet . Floss and I had half consumed our quartered hearts of lettuce before we noticed the others hadn’t touched theirs . You seem quite normal. Can you tell me? Why does one want to write a poem? Because it’s there to be written. Oh. A matter of inspiration then? Of necessity. Oh. But what sets it off? I am that he whose brains are scattered aimlessly —and so, the hour done, the quail eaten, we were on our way back to El Paso. Good night. Good night and thank you . No. Thank you. We’re going to walk . —and so, on the naked wrist, we feel again those insistent fingers . Penny please, mister. Penny please. Give me penny. Here! now go away. —but the music, the music has reawakened as we leave the busier parts of the street and come again to the bridge in the semi-dark, pay our fee and begin again to cross . seeing the lights along the mountain back of El Paso and pause to watch the boys calling out to us to throw more coins to them standing in the shallow water . so that’s where the incentive lay, with the annoyance of those surprising fingers. So you’re a poet? a good thing to be got rid of—half drunk, a free dinner under your belt, even though you get typhoid—and to have met people you can at least talk to . relief from that changeless, endless inescapable and insistent music . What else, Latins, do you yourselves seek but relief! with the expressionless ding dong you dish up to us of your souls and your loves, which we swallow. Spaniards! (though these are mostly Indians who chase the white bastards through the streets on their Independence Day and try to kill them) . What’s that? Oh, come on. But what’s THAT? the music! the _music_! as when Casals struck and held a deep cello tone and I am speechless . There it sat in the projecting angle of the bridge flange as I stood aghast and looked at it— in the half-light: shapeless or rather returned to its original shape, armless, legless, headless, packed like the pit of a fruit into that obscure corner—or a fish to swim against the stream—or a child in the womb prepared to imitate life, warding its life against a birth of awful promise. The music guards it, a mucus, a film that surrounds it, a benumbing ink that stains the sea of our minds—to hold us off—shed of a shape close as it can get to no shape, a music! a protecting music . I _am_ a poet! I am. I am. I am a poet, I reaffirmed, ashamed Now the music volleys through as in a lonely moment I hear it. Now it is all about me. The dance! The verb detaches itself seeking to become articulate . And I could not help thinking of the wonders of the brain that hears that music and of our skill sometimes to record it. _Journey to Love_ (_1955_) _For My Wife_ _=A Negro Woman=_ carrying a bunch of marigolds wrapped in an old newspaper: She carries them upright, bareheaded, the bulk of her thighs causing her to waddle as she walks looking into the store window which she passes on her way. What is she but an ambassador from another world a world of pretty marigolds of two shades which she announces not knowing what she does other than walk the streets holding the flowers upright as a torch so early in the morning. _=The Ivy Crown=_ The whole process is a lie, unless, crowned by excess, it break forcefully, one way or another, from its confinement— or find a deeper well. Antony and Cleopatra were right; they have shown the way. I love you or I do not live at all. Daffodil time is past. This is summer, summer! the heart says, and not even the full of it. No doubts are permitted— though they will come and may before our time overwhelm us. We are only mortal but being mortal can defy our fate. We may by an outside chance even win! We do not look to see jonquils and violets come again but there are, still, the roses! Romance has no part in it. The business of love is cruelty _which_, by our wills, we transform to live together. It has its seasons, for and against, whatever the heart fumbles in the dark to assert toward the end of May. Just as the nature of briars is to tear flesh, I have proceeded through them. Keep the briars out, they say. You cannot live and keep free of briars. Children pick flowers. Let them. Though having them in hand they have no further use for them but leave them crumpled at the curb’s edge. At our age the imagination across the sorry facts lifts us to make roses stand before thorns. Sure love is cruel and selfish and totally obtuse— at least, blinded by the light, young love is. But we are older, I to love and you to be loved, we have, no matter how, by our wills survived to keep the jeweled prize always at our finger tips. We will it so and so it is past all accident. _=View by Color Photography on a Commercial Calendar=_ The church of Vice-Morcate in the Canton Ticino with its apple blossoms is beautiful as anything I have ever seen in or out of Switzerland. The beauty of holiness the beauty of a man’s anger reflecting his sex or a woman’s either, mountainous, or a little stone church from a height or close to the camera the apple tree in blossom or the far lake below in the distance— are equal as they are unsurpassed. Peace after the event comes from their contemplation, a great peace. The sky is cut off, there is no horizon just the mountainside bordered by water on which tiny waves without passion unconcerned cover the invisible fish. And who but we are concerned with the beauty of apple blossoms and a small church on a promontory, an ancient church— by the look of its masonry— abandoned by a calm lake in the mountains where the sun shines of a springtime afternoon. Something has come to an end here, it has been accomplished. _=The Sparrow=_ (_To My Father_) This sparrow who comes to sit at my window is a poetic truth more than a natural one. His voice, his movements, his habits— how he loves to flutter his wings in the dust— all attest it; granted, he does it to rid himself of lice but the relief he feels makes him cry out lustily— which is a trait more related to music than otherwise. Wherever he finds himself in early spring, on back streets or beside palaces, he carries on unaffectedly his amours. It begins in the egg, his sex genders it: What is more pretentiously useless or about which we more pride ourselves? It leads as often as not to our undoing. The cockerel, the crow with their challenging voices cannot surpass the insistence of his cheep! Once at El Paso toward evening, I saw—and heard!— ten thousand sparrows who had come in from the desert to roost. They filled the trees of a small park. Men fled (with ears ringing!) from their droppings, leaving the premises to the alligators who inhabit the fountain. His image is familiar as that of the aristocratic unicorn, a pity there are not more oats eaten nowadays to make living easier for him. At that, his small size, keen eyes, serviceable beak and general truculence assure his survival— to say nothing of his innumerable brood. Even the Japanese know him and have painted him sympathetically, with profound insight into his minor characteristics. Nothing even remotely subtle about his lovemaking. He crouches before the female, drags his wings, waltzing, throws back his head and simply— yells! The din is terrific. The way he swipes his bill across a plank to clean it, is decisive. So with everything he does. His coppery eyebrows give him the air of being always a winner—and yet I saw once, the female of his species clinging determinedly to the edge of a water pipe, catch him by his crown-feathers to hold him silent, subdued, hanging above the city streets until she was through with him. What was the use of that? _She_ hung there herself, puzzled at her success. I laughed heartily. Practical to the end, it is the poem of his existence that triumphed finally; a wisp of feathers flattened to the pavement, wings spread symmetrically as if in flight, the head gone, the black escutcheon of the breast undecipherable, an effigy of a sparrow, a dried wafer only, left to say and it says it without offense, beautifully; This was I, a sparrow. I did my best; farewell. =_The King!_= Nell Gwyn, it says in the dictionary, actress and mistress of Charles the Second: what a lot of pious rot there is surrounding that simple statement. She waked in the morning, bathed in the King’s bountiful water which enveloped her completely and, magically, with the grit, took away all her sins. It was the King’s body which was served; the King’s boards which in the evening she capably trod; she fed the King’s poor and when she died, left them some slight moneys under certain conditions. Happy the woman whose husband makes her the “King’s whore.” All this you will find in the dictionary where it has been preserved forever— since it is beautiful and true. _=The Lady Speaks=_ A storm raged among the live oaks while my husband and I sat in the semi-dark listening! We watched from the windows, the lights off, saw the moss whipped upright by the wind’s force. Two candles we had lit side by side before us so solidly had our house been built kept their tall flames unmoved. May it be so when a storm sends the moss whipping back and forth upright above my head like flames in the final fury. _=Tribute to the Painters=_ Satyrs dance! all the deformities take wing centaurs leading to the rout of the vocables in the writings of Gertrude Stein—but you cannot be an artist by mere ineptitude . The dream is in pursuit! The neat figures of Paul Klee fill the canvas but that is not the work of a child . The cure began, perhaps, with the abstractions of Arabic art Dürer with his _Melancholy_ was ware of it— the shattered masonry. Leonardo saw it, the obsession, and ridiculed it in _La Gioconda_. Bosch’s congeries of tortured souls and devils who prey on them fish swallowing their own entrails Freud Picasso Juan Gris. The letter from a friend saying: For the last three nights I have slept like a baby without liquor or dope of any sort! We know that a stasis from a chrysalis has stretched its wings— like a bull or the Minotaur or Beethoven in the scherzo of his 9th Symphony stomped his heavy feet . I saw love mounted naked on a horse on a swan the back of a fish the bloodthirsty conger eel and laughed recalling the Jew in the pit among his fellows when the indifferent chap with the machine gun was spraying the heap. He had not yet been hit but smiled comforting his companions. Dreams possess me and the dance of my thoughts involving animals the blameless beasts and there came to me just now the knowledge of the tyranny of the image and how men in their designs have learned to shatter it whatever it may be, that the trouble in their minds shall be quieted, put to bed again. _=To a Man Dying on His Feet=_ —not that we are not all “dying on our feet” but the look you give me and to which I bow, is more immediate. It is keenly alert, suspicious of me— as of all that are living—and apologetic. Your jaw wears the stubble of a haggard beard, a dirty beard, which resembles the snow through which your long legs are conducting you. Whither? Where are you going? This would be a fine day to go on a journey. Say to Florida where at this season all go nowadays. There grows the hibiscus, the star jasmine and more than I can tell but the odors from what I know must be alluring. Come with me there! you look like a good guy, come this evening. The plane leaves at 6:30 or have you another appointment? _=Come on!=_ A different kind of thought blander and more desperate like that of Sergeant So-and-So at the road in Belleau Wood: Come on! Do you want to live forever?— That is the essence of poetry. But it does not always take the same form. For the most part it consists in listening to the nightingale or fools. _=The Pink Locust=_ I’m persistent as the pink locust, once admitted to the garden, you will not easily get rid of it. Tear it from the ground, if one hair-thin rootlet remain it will come again. It is flattering to think of myself so. It is also laughable. A modest flower, resembling a pink sweet-pea, you cannot help but admire it until its habits become known. Are we not most of us like that? It would be too much if the public pried among the minutiae of our private affairs. Not that we have anything to hide but could _they_ stand it? Of course the world would be gratified to find out what fools we have made of ourselves. The question is, would they be generous with us— as we have been with others? It is, as I say, a flower incredibly resilient under attack! Neglect it and it will grow into a tree. I wish I could _so_ think of myself and of what is to become of me. The poet himself, what does he think of himself facing his world? It will not do to say, as he is inclined to say: Not much. The poem would be in _that_ betrayed. He might as well answer— “a rose is a rose is a rose” and let it go at that. A rose _is_ a rose and the poem equals it if it be well made. The poet cannot slight himself without slighting his poem— which would be ridiculous. Life offers no greater reward. And so, like this flower, I persist— for what there may be in it. I am not, I know, in the galaxy of poets a rose but _who_, among the rest, will deny me my place. _=Classic Picture=_ It is a classic picture, women have always fussed with their hair (having no sisters I never watched the process so intimately as this time); the reason for it is not clear— tho’ I acknowledge, an unkempt head of hair, while not as repulsive as a nest of snakes, is repulsive enough in a woman. Therefore she fusses with her hair for a woman does not want to seem repulsive, unless . to gain for herself . she be hungry, hungry! as would be a man and all hunger is repulsive and puts on an ugly face. Their heads are not made as a man’s, an ornament in itself. They have other charms— needless to enumerate. Under their ornate coiffures lurks a specter, coiling snakes doubling for tresses . A woman’s brains which can be keen are condemned, like a poet’s, to what deceptions she can muster to lead men to their ruin. But look more deeply into her maneuvers, and puzzle as we will about them they may mean anything . _=Address:=_ To a look in my son’s eyes— I hope he did not see that I was looking— that I have seen often enough in the mirror, a male look approaching despair— there is a female look to match it no need to speak of that: Perhaps it was only a dreamy look not an unhappy one but absent from the world— such as plagued the eyes of Bobby Burns in his youth and threw him into the arms of women— in which he could forget himself, not defiantly, but with full acceptance of his lot as a man . . His Jean forgave him and took him to her heart time after time when he would be too drunk with Scotch or the love of other women to notice what he was doing. What was he intent upon but to drown out that look? What does it portend? A war will not erase it nor a bank account, estlin, amounting to 9 figures. Flow gently sweet Afton among thy green braes— no matter that he wrote the song to another woman it was never for sale. _=The Drunk and the Sailor=_ The petty fury that disrupts my life— at the striking of a wrong key as if it had been a woman lost or a fortune . . The man was obviously drunk, Christopher Marlowe could have been no drunker when he got himself stuck through the eye with a poniard. The bus station was crowded. The man heavy-set about my own age seventy was talking privately with a sailor. He had an ugly jaw on him. Suddenly sitting there on the bench too drunk to stand he began menacingly his screaming. The young sailor who could have flattened him at one blow kept merely looking at him. The nerve-tingling screeches that sprang _sforzando_ from that stubble beard would have distinguished an operatic tenor. But me— the shock of it— my heart leaped in my chest so that I saw red wanted to strangle the guy . The fury of love is no less. _=A Smiling Dane=_ The Danish native before the Christian era whose body features intact with a rope also intact round the neck found recently in a peat bog is dead. Are you surprised? You should be. The diggers who discovered him expected more. Frightened they quit the place thinking his ghost might walk. The cast of his features shows him to be a man of intelligence. It did him no good. What his eyes saw cannot be more than the male and female of it— if as much. His stomach its contents examined shows him before he died to have had a meal consisting of local grains swallowed whole which he probably enjoyed though he did not much as we do chew them. And what if the image of his frightened executioners is not recorded? Do we not know their features as if it had occurred today? We can still see in his smile their grimaces. _=Shadows=_ I Shadows cast by the street light under the stars, the head is tilted back, the long shadow of the legs presumes a world taken for granted on which the cricket trills. The hollows of the eyes are unpeopled. Right and left climb the ladders of night as dawn races to put out the stars. That is the poetic figure but we know better: what is not now will never be. Sleep secure, the little dog in the snapshot keeps his shrewd eyes pared. Memory is liver than sight. A man looking out, seeing the shadows— it is himself that can be painlessly amputated by a mere shifting of the stars. A comfort so easily not to be and to be at once one with every man. The night blossoms with a thousand shadows so long as there are stars, street lights or a moon and who shall say by their shadows which is different from the other fat or lean. II Ripped from the concept of our lives and from all concept somehow, and plainly, the sun will come up each morning and sink again. So that we experience violently every day two worlds one of which we share with the rose in bloom and one, by far the greater, with the past, the world of memory, the silly world of history, the world of the imagination. Which leaves only the beasts and trees, crystals with their refractive surfaces and rotting things to stir our wonder. Save for the little central hole of the eye itself into which we dare not stare too hard or we are lost. The instant trivial as it is is all we have unless—unless things the imagination feeds upon, the scent of the rose, startle us anew. =_Asphodel, That Greeny Flower_= BOOK I Of asphodel, that greeny flower, like a buttercup upon its branching stem— save that it’s green and wooden— I come, my sweet, to sing to you. We lived long together a life filled, if you will, with flowers. So that I was cheered when I came first to know that there were flowers also in hell. Today I’m filled with the fading memory of those flowers that we both loved, even to this poor colorless thing— I saw it when I was a child— little prized among the living but the dead see, asking among themselves: What do I remember that was shaped as this thing is shaped? while our eyes fill with tears. Of love, abiding love it will be telling though too weak a wash of crimson colors it to make it wholly credible. There is something something urgent I have to say to you and you alone but it must wait while I drink in the joy of your approach, perhaps for the last time. And so with fear in my heart I drag it out and keep on talking for I dare not stop. Listen while I talk on against time. It will not be for long. I have forgot . and yet I see clearly enough something central to the sky which ranges round it. An odor springs from it! A sweetest odor! Honeysuckle! And now there comes the buzzing of a bee! and a whole flood of sister memories! Only give me time, time to recall them before I shall speak out. Give me time, time. When I was a boy I kept a book to which, from time to time, I added pressed flowers until, after a time, I had a good collection. The asphodel, forebodingly, among them. I bring you, reawakened, a memory of those flowers. They were sweet when I pressed them and retained something of their sweetness a long time. It is a curious odor, a moral odor, that brings me near to you. The color was the first to go. There had come to me a challenge, your dear self, mortal as I was, the lily’s thoat to the hummingbird! Endless wealth, I thought, held out its arms to me. A thousand topics in an apple blossom. The generous earth itself gave us lief. The whole world became my garden! But the sea which no one tends is also a garden when the sun strikes it and the waves are wakened. I have seen it and so have you when it puts all flowers to shame. Too, there are the starfish stiffened by the sun and other sea wrack and weeds. We knew that along with the rest of it for we were born by the sea, knew its rose hedges to the very water’s brink. There the pink mallow grows and in their season strawberries and there, later, we went to gather the wild plum. I cannot say that I have gone to hell for your love but often found myself there in your pursuit. I do not like it and wanted to be in heaven. Hear me out. Do not turn away. I have learned much in my life from books and out of them about love. Death is not the end of it. There is a hierarchy which can be attained, I think, in its service. Its guerdon is a fairy flower; a cat of twenty lives. If no one came to try it the world would be the loser. It has been for you and me as one who watches a storm come in over the water. We have stood from year to year before the spectacle of our lives with joined hands. The storm unfolds. Lightning plays about the edges of the clouds. The sky to the north is placid, blue in the afterglow as the storm piles up. It is a flower that will soon reach the apex of its bloom. We danced, in our minds, and read a book together. You remember? It was a serious book. And so books entered our lives. The sea! The sea! Always when I think of the sea there comes to mind the _Iliad_ and Helen’s public fault that bred it. Were it not for that there would have been no poem but the world if we had remembered, those crimson petals spilled among the stones, would have called it simply murder. The sexual orchid that bloomed then sending so many disinterested men to their graves has left its memory to a race of fools or heroes if silence is a virtue. The sea alone with its multiplicity holds any hope. The storm has proven abortive but we remain after the thoughts it roused to re-cement our lives. It is the mind the mind that must be cured short of death’s intervention, and the will becomes again a garden. The poem is complex and the place made in our lives for the poem. Silence can be complex too, but you do not get far with silence. Begin again. It is like Homer’s catalogue of ships: it fills up the time. I speak in figures, well enough, the dresses you wear are figures also, we could not meet otherwise. When I speak of flowers it is to recall that at one time we were young. All women are not Helen, I know that, but have Helen in their hearts. My sweet, you have it also, therefore I love you and could not love you otherwise. Imagine you saw a field made up of women all silver-white. What should you do but love them? The storm bursts or fades! it is not the end of the world. Love is something else, or so I thought it, a garden which expands, though I knew you as a woman and never thought otherwise, until the whole sea has been taken up and all its gardens. It was the love of love, the love that swallows up all else, a grateful love, a love of nature, of people, animals, a love engendering gentleness and goodness that moved me and _that_ I saw in you. I should have known though I did not, that the lily-of-the-valley is a flower makes many ill who whiff it. We had our children, rivals in the general onslaught. I put them aside though I cared for them as well as any man could care for his children according to my lights. You understand I had to meet you after the event and have still to meet you. Love to which you too shall bow along with me— a flower a weakest flower shall be our trust and not because we are too feeble to do otherwise but because at the height of my power I risked what I had to do, therefore to prove that we love each other while my very bones sweated that I could not cry to you in the act. Of asphodel, that greeny flower, I come, my sweet, to sing to you! My heart rouses thinking to bring you news of something that concerns you and concerns many men. Look at what passes for the new. You will not find it there but in despised poems. It is difficult to get the news from poems yet men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there. Hear me out for I too am concerned and every man who wants to die at peace in his bed besides. BOOK II Approaching death, as we think, the death of love, no distinction any more suffices to differentiate the particulars of place and condition with which we have been long familiar. All appears as if seen wavering through water. We start awake with a cry of recognition but soon the outlines become again vague. If we are to understand our time, we must find the key to it, not in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but in earlier, wilder and darker epochs . . So to know, what I have to know about my own death, if it be real, I have to take it apart. What does your generation think of Cézanne? I asked a young artist. The abstractions of Hindu painting, he replied, is all at the moment which interests me. He liked my poem about the parts of a broken bottle, lying green in the cinders of a hospital courtyard. There was also, to his mind, the one on gay wallpaper which he had heard about but not read. I was grateful to him for his interest. Do you remember how at Interlaken we were waiting, four days, to see the Jungfrau but rain had fallen steadily. Then just before train time on a tip from one of the waitresses we rushed to the Gipfel Platz and there it was! in the distance covered with new-fallen snow. When I was at Granada, I remember, in the overpowering heat climbing a treeless hill overlooking the Alhambra. At my appearance at the summit two small boys who had been playing there made themselves scarce. Starting to come down by a new path I at once found myself surrounded by gypsy women who came up to me, I could speak little Spanish, and directed me, guided by a young girl, on my way. These were the pinnacles. The deaths I suffered began in the heads about me, my eyes were too keen not to see through the world’s niggardliness. I accepted it as my fate. The wealthy I defied or not so much they, for they have their uses, as they who take their cues from them. I lived to breathe above the stench not knowing how I in my own person would be overcome finally. I was lost failing the poem. But if I have come from the sea it is not to be wholly fascinated by the glint of waves. The free interchange of light over their surface which I have compared to a garden should not deceive us or prove too difficult a figure. The poem if it reflects the sea reflects only its dance upon that profound depth where it seems to triumph. The bomb puts an end to all that. I am reminded that the bomb also is a flower dedicated howbeit to our destruction. The mere picture of the exploding bomb fascinates us so that we cannot wait to prostrate ourselves before it. We do not believe that love can so wreck our lives. The end will come in its time. Meanwhile we are sick to death of the bomb and its childlike insistence. Death is no answer, no answer— to a blind old man whose bones have the movement of the sea, a sexless old man for whom it is a sea of which his verses are made up. There is no power so great as love which is a sea, which is a garden— as enduring as the verses of that blind old man destined to live forever. Few men believe that nor in the games of children. They believe rather in the bomb and shall die by the bomb. Compare Darwin’s voyage of the _Beagle_, a voyage of discovery if there ever was one, to the death incommunicado in the electric chair of the Rosenbergs. It is the mark of the times that though we condemn what they stood for we admire their fortitude. But Darwin opened our eyes to the gardens of the world, as they closed them. Or take that other voyage which promised so much but due to the world’s avarice breeding hatred through fear, ended so disastrously; a voyage with which I myself am so deeply concerned, that of the _Pinta_, the _Niña_ and the _Santa María_. How the world opened its eyes! It was a flower upon which April had descended from the skies! How bitter a disappointment! In all, this led mainly to the deaths I have suffered. For there had been kindled more minds than that of the discoverers and set dancing to a measure, a new measure! Soon lost. The measure itself has been lost and we suffer for it. We come to our deaths in silence. The bomb speaks. All suppressions, from the witchcraft trials at Salem to the latest book burnings are confessions that the bomb has entered our lives to destroy us. Every drill driven into the earth for oil enters my side also. Waste, waste! dominates the world. It is the bomb’s work. What else was the fire at the Jockey Club in Buenos Aires (_malos aires_, we should say) when with Perón’s connivance the hoodlums destroyed, along with the books the priceless Goyas that hung there? You know how we treasured the few paintings we still cling to especially the one by the dead Charlie Demuth. With your smiles and other trivia of the sort my secret life has been made up, some baby’s life which had been lost had I not intervened. But the words made solely of air or less, that came to me out of the air and insisted on being written down, I regret most— that there has come an end to them. For in spite of it all, all that I have brought on myself, grew that single image that I adore equally with you and so it brought us together. BOOK III What power has love but forgiveness? In other words by its intervention what has been done can be undone. What good is it otherwise? Because of this I have invoked the flower in that frail as it is after winter’s harshness it comes again to delect us. Asphodel, the ancients believed, in hell’s despite was such a flower. With daisies pied and violets blue, we say, the spring of the year comes in! So may it be with the spring of love’s year also if we can but find the secret word to transform it. It is ridiculous what airs we put on to seem profound while our hearts gasp dying for want of love. Having your love I was rich. Thinking to have lost it I am tortured and cannot rest. I do not come to you abjectly with confessions of my faults, I have confessed, all of them. In the name of love I come proudly as to an equal to be forgiven. Let me, for I know you take it hard, with good reason, give the steps if it may be by which you shall mount, again to think well of me. The statue of Colleoni’s horse with the thickset little man on top in armor presenting a naked sword comes persistently to my mind. And with him the horse rampant roused by the mare in the Venus and Adonis. These are pictures of crude force. Once at night waiting at a station with a friend a fast freight thundered through kicking up the dust. My friend, a distinguished artist, turned with me to protect his eyes: That’s what we’d all like to be, Bill, he said. I smiled knowing how deeply he meant it. I saw another man yesterday in the subway. I was on my way uptown to a meeting. He kept looking at me and I at him: He had a worn knobbed stick between his knees suitable to keep off dogs, a man of perhaps forty. He wore a beard parted in the middle, a black beard, and a hat, a brown felt hat lighter than his skin. His eyes, which were intelligent, were wide open but evasive, mild. I was frankly curious and looked at him closely. He was slight of build but robust enough had on a double-breasted black coat and a vest which showed at the neck the edge of a heavy and very dirty undershirt. His trousers were striped and a lively reddish brown. His shoes which were good if somewhat worn had been recently polished. His brown socks were about his ankles. In his breast pocket he carried a gold fountain pen and a mechanical pencil. For some reason which I could not fathom I was unable to keep my eyes off him. A worn leather zipper case bulging with its contents lay between his ankles on the floor. Then I remembered: When my father was a young man— it came to me from an old photograph— he wore such a beard. This man reminds me of my father. I am looking into my father’s face! Some surface of some advertising sign is acting as a reflector. It is my own. But at once the car grinds to a halt. Speak to him, I cried. He will know the secret. He was gone and I did nothing about it. With him went all men and all women too were in his loins. Fanciful or not it seemed to me a flower whose savor had been lost. It was a flower some exotic orchid that Herman Melville had admired in the Hawaiian jungle. Or the lilacs of men who left their marks, by torchlight, rituals of the hunt, on the walls of prehistoric caves in the Pyrenees— what draftsmen they were— bison and deer. Their women had big buttocks. But what draftsmen they were! By my father’s beard, what draftsmen. And so, by chance, how should it be otherwise? from what came to me in a subway train I build a picture of all men. It is winter and there waiting for you to care for them are your plants. Poor things! you say as you compassionately pour at their roots the reviving water. Lean-cheeked I say to myself kindness moves her shall she not be kind also to me? At this courage possessed me finally to go on. Sweet, creep into my arms! I spoke hurriedly in the spell of some wry impulse when I boasted that there was any pride left in me. Do not believe it. Unless in a special way, a way I shrink to speak of I am proud. After that manner I call on you as I do on myself the same to forgive all women who have offended you. It is the artist’s failing to seek and to yield such forgiveness. It will cure us both. Let us keep it to ourselves but trust it. These heads that stick up all around me are, I take it, also proud. But the flowers know at least this much, that it is not spring and will be proud only in the proper season. A trance holds men. They are dazed and their faces in the public print show it. We follow them as children followed the Pied Piper of Hamelin—but he was primarily interested only in rats. I say to you privately that the heads of most men I see at meetings or when I come up against them elsewhere are full of cupidity. Let us breed from those others. They are the flowers of the race. The asphodel poor as it is is among them. But in their pride there come to my mind the daisy, not the shy flower of England but the brilliance that mantled with white the fields which we knew as children. Do you remember their spicy-sweet odor? What abundance! There are many other flowers I could recall for your pleasure: the small yellow sweet-scented violet that grew in marshy places! You were like those though I quickly correct myself for you were a woman and no flower and had to face the problems which confront a woman. But you were for all that flowerlike and I say this to you now and it is the thing which compounded my torment that I never forgot it. You have forgiven me making me new again. So that here in the place dedicated in the imagination to memory of the dead I bring you a last flower. Don’t think that because I say this in a poem it can be treated lightly or that the facts will not uphold it. Are facts not flowers and flowers facts or poems flowers or all works of the imagination, interchangeable? Which proves that love rules them all, for then you will be my queen, my queen of love forever more. CODA Inseparable from the fire its light takes precedence over it. Then follows what we have dreaded— but it can never overcome what has gone before. In the huge gap between the flash and the thunderstroke spring has come in or a deep snow fallen. Call it old age. In that stretch we have lived to see a colt kick up his heels. Do not hasten laugh and play in an eternity the heat will not overtake the light. That’s sure. That gelds the bomb, permitting that the mind contain it. This is that interval, that sweetest interval, when love will blossom, come early, come late and give itself to the lover. Only the imagination is real! I have declared it time without end. If a man die it is because death has first possessed his imagination. But if he refuse death— no greater evil can befall him unless it be the death of love meet him in full career. Then indeed for him the light has gone out. But love and the imagination are of a piece, swift as the light to avoid destruction. So we come to watch time’s flight as we might watch summer lightning or fireflies, secure, by grace of the imagination, safe in its care. For if the light itself has escaped, the whole edifice opposed to it goes down. Light, the imagination and love, in our age, by natural law, which we worship, maintain all of a piece their dominance. So let us love confident as is the light in its struggle with darkness that there is as much to say and more for the one side and that not the darker which John Donne for instance among many men presents to us. In the controversy touching the younger and the older Tolstoi, Villon, St. Anthony, Kung, Rimbaud, Buddha and Abraham Lincoln the palm goes always to the light; Who most shall advance the light— call it what you may! The light for all time shall outspeed the thunder crack. Medieval pageantry is human and we enjoy the rumor of it as in our world we enjoy the reading of Chaucer, likewise a priest’s raiment (or that of a savage chieftain). It is all a celebration of the light. All the pomp and ceremony of weddings, “Sweet Thames, run softly till I end my song,”— are of an equal sort. For our wedding, too, the light was wakened and shone. The light! the light stood before us waiting! I thought the world stood still. At the altar so intent was I before my vows, so moved by your presence a girl so pale and ready to faint that I pitied and wanted to protect you. As I think of it now, after a lifetime, it is as if a sweet-scented flower were poised and for me did open. Asphodel has no odor save to the imagination but it too celebrates the light. It is late but an odor as from our wedding has revived for me and begun again to penetrate into all crevices of my world. THE END TRANSCRIBER NOTES Misspelled words and printer errors have been corrected. Where multiple spellings occur, majority use has been employed. Punctuation has been maintained except where obvious printer errors occur. A cover has been created for this ebook. The picture which Williams used as the inspiration for the first poem is the one appearing on the cover created for this ebook. The poem is titled 'Self Portrait'. The intriguing thing is that not only is the person in the painting not Brueghel, it is widely believed to have not been painted by Brueghel. [The end of _Pictures from Brueghel and Other Poems_ by William Carlos Williams]