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IF THE BOOK IS UNDER COPYRIGHT IN YOUR COUNTRY, DO NOT DOWNLOAD OR REDISTRIBUTE THIS FILE. _Title:_ The Collected Earlier Poems of William Carlos Williams _Date of first publication:_ 1938 _Author:_ William Carlos Williams (1883-1963) _Date first posted:_ Sep. 11, 2020 _Date last updated:_ Sep. 11, 2020 Faded Page eBook #20200926 This eBook was produced by: Al Haines, Jen Haines & the online Distributed Proofreaders Canada team at https://www.pgdpcanada.net [Cover Illustration] =_By William Carlos Williams (in print)_= _In the American Grain_ (prose) _Selected Poems_ _A Dream of Love_ (a play) _Make Light of It_ (_collected stories_) _Paterson_ (a poem) _In the Money_ (a novel) _The Collected Later Poems_ _The Collected Earlier Poems_ =_The Collected Earlier Poems of_= WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS =_A NEW DIRECTIONS BOOK_= Copyright 1938, 1951, by William Carlos Williams Manufactured in the United States of America by The Haddon Craftsmen, Inc., Scranton, Pa. New Directions Books are published by James Laughlin at Norfolk, Connecticut. New York Office: 333 Sixth Avenue (14) Designed by Maurice Serle Kaplan =_Contents_= _The Wanderer_ 1 _The Tempers_ 13 _March · History_ 41 _History_ 47 _Delia Primavera Trasportata Al Morale_ 55 _An Early Martyr_ 83 _Al Que Quiere_ (_To Him Who Wants It_) 115 _Fish · Romance Moderne_ 175 _Sour Grapes_ 185 _Paterson · The Flower_ 231 _Spring and All_ 239 _Struggle of Wings_ 289 _The Descent of Winter_ 295 _Impromptu: The Suckers_ 313 _Collected Poems 1934_ 319 _An Elegy for D. H. Lawrence_ 359 _Adam and Eve and the City_ 365 _Morning · The Crimson Cyclamen_ 391 _Recent Verse 1938_ 405 _The Drunkard_ 435 INDEX OF POEMS BY TITLES 467 =_Acknowledgments_= The poems from _An Early Martyr_ and _Adam &_ _Eve & The City_ are included through the courtesy of Ronald Land Latimer of the Alcestis Press, who first published them in limited editions. _=The Wanderer=_ _=The Wanderer_= A ROCOCO STUDY _ADVENT_ Even in the time when as yet I had no certain knowledge of her She sprang from the nest, a young crow, Whose first flight circled the forest. I know now how then she showed me Her mind, reaching out to the horizon, She close above the tree tops. I saw her eyes straining at the new distance And as the woods fell from her flying Likewise they fell from me as I followed So that I strongly guessed all that I must put from me To come through ready for the high courses. But one day, crossing the ferry With the great towers of Manhattan before me, Out at the prow with the sea wind blowing, I had been wearying many questions Which she had put on to try me: How shall I be a mirror to this modernity? When lo! in a rush, dragging A blunt boat on the yielding river— Suddenly I saw her! And she waved me From the white wet in midst of her playing! She cried me, “Haia! Here I am, son! See how strong my little finger is! Can I not swim well? I can fly too!” And with that a great sea-gull Went to the left, vanishing with a wild cry— But in my mind all the persons of godhead Followed after. _CLARITY_ “Come!” cried my mind and by her might That was upon us we flew above the river Seeking her, grey gulls among the white— In the air speaking as she had willed it; “I am given,” cried I, “now I know it! I know now all my time is forespent! For me one face is all the world! For I have seen her at last, this day, In whom age in age is united— Indifferent, out of sequence, marvelously! Saving alone that one sequence Which is the beauty of all the world, for surely Either there in the rolling smoke spheres below us Or here with us in the air intercircling, Certainly somewhere here about us I know she is revealing these things!” And as gulls we flew and with soft cries We seemed to speak, flying, “It is she The mighty, recreating the whole world, This is the first day of wonders! She is attiring herself before me— Taking shape before me for worship, A red leaf that falls upon a stone! It is she of whom I told you, old Forgiveless, unreconcilable; That high wanderer of by-ways Walking imperious in beggary! At her throat is loose gold, a single chain From among many, on her bent fingers Are rings from which the stones are fallen, Her wrists wear a diminished state, her ankles Are bare! Toward the river! Is it she there?” And we swerved clamorously downward— “I will take my peace in her henceforth!” _BROADWAY_ It was then she struck—from behind, In mid air, as with the edge of a great wing! And instantly down the mists of my eyes There came crowds walking—men as visions With expressionless, animate faces; Empty men with shell-thin bodies Jostling close above the gutter, Hasting—nowhere! And then for the first time I really saw her, really scented the sweat Of her presence and—fell back sickened! Ominous, old, painted— With bright lips, and lewd Jew’s eyes Her might strapped in by a corset To give her age youth, perfect In her will to be young she had covered The godhead to go beside me. Silent, her voice entered at my eyes And my astonished thought followed her easily: “Well, do their eyes shine, do their clothes fit? These live I tell you! Old men with red cheeks, Young men in gay suits! See them! Dogged, quivering, impassive— Well—are these the ones you envied?” At which I answered her, “Marvelous old queen, Grant me power to catch something of this day’s Air and sun into your service! That these toilers after peace and after pleasure May turn to you, worshippers at all hours!” But she sniffed upon the words warily— Yet I persisted, watching for an answer: “To you, horrible old woman, Who know all fires out of the bodies Of all men that walk with lust at heart! To you, O mighty, crafty prowler After the youth of all cities, drunk With the sight of thy archness! All the youth That come to you, you having the knowledge Rather than to those uninitiate— To you, marvelous old queen, give me always A new marriage—” But she laughed loudly— “A new grip upon those garments that brushed me In days gone by on beach, lawn, and in forest! May I be lifted still, up and out of terror, Up from before the death living around me— Torn up continually and carried Whatever way the head of your whim is, A burr upon those streaming tatters—” But the night had fallen, she stilled me And led me away. _THE STRIKE_ At the first peep of dawn she roused me! I rose trembling at the change which the night saw! For there, wretchedly brooding in a corner From which her old eyes glittered fiercely— “Go!” she said, and I hurried shivering Out into the deserted streets of Paterson. That night she came again, hovering In rags within the filmy ceiling— “Great Queen, bless me with thy tatters!” “You are blest, go on!” “Hot for savagery, Sucking the air! I went into the city, Out again, baffled onto the mountain! Back into the city! Nowhere The subtle! Everywhere the electric!” “A short bread-line before a hitherto empty tea shop: No questions—all stood patiently, Dominated by one idea: something That carried them as they are always wanting to be carried, ‘But what is it,’ I asked those nearest me, ‘This thing heretofore unobtainable ‘That they seem so clever to have put on now!’ “Why since I have failed them can it be anything but their own brood? Can it be anything but brutality? On that at least they’re united! That at least Is their bean soup, their calm bread and a few luxuries! “But in me, more sensitive, marvelous old queen It sank deep into the blood, that I rose upon The tense air enjoying the dusty fight! Heavy drink where the low, sloping foreheads The flat skulls with the unkempt black or blond hair, The ugly legs of the young girls, pistons Too powerful for delicacy! The women’s wrists, the men’s arms red Used to heat and cold, to toss quartered beeves And barrels, and milk-cans, and crates of fruit! “Faces all knotted up like burls on oaks, Grasping, fox-snouted, thick-lipped, Sagging breasts and protruding stomachs, Rasping voices, filthy habits with the hands. Nowhere you! Everywhere the electric! “Ugly, venomous, gigantic! Tossing me as a great father his helpless Infant till it shriek with ecstasy And its eyes roll and its tongue hangs out!— “I am at peace again, old queen, I listen clearer now.” _ABROAD_ Never, even in a dream, Have I winged so high nor so well As with her, she leading me by the hand, That first day on the Jersey mountains! And never shall I forget The trembling interest with which I heard Her voice in a low thunder: “You are safe here. Look child, look open-mouth! The patch of road between the steep bramble banks; The tree in the wind, the white house there, the sky! Speak to men of these, concerning me! For never while you permit them to ignore me In these shall the full of my freed voice Come grappling the ear with intent! Never while the air’s clear coolness Is seized to be a coat for pettiness; Never while richness of greenery Stands a shield for prurient minds; Never, permitting these things unchallenged Shall my voice of leaves and varicolored bark come free through!” At which, knowing her solitude, I shouted over the country below me: “Waken! my people, to the boughs green With ripening fruit within you! Waken to the myriad cinquefoil In the waving grass of your minds! Waken to the silent phoebe nest Under the eaves of your spirit!” But she, stooping nearer the shifting hills Spoke again. “Look there! See them! There in the oat field with the horses, See them there! bowed by their passions Crushed down, that had been raised as a roof beam! The weight of the sky is upon them Under which all roof beams crumble. There is none but the single roof beam: There is no love bears against the great firefly!” At this I looked up at the sun Then shouted again with all the might I had. But my voice was a seed in the wind. Then she, the old one, laughing Seized me and whirling about bore back To the city, upward, still laughing Until the great towers stood above the marshland Wheeling beneath: the little creeks, the mallows That I picked as a boy, the Hackensack So quiet that seemed so broad formerly: The crawling trains, the cedar swamp on the one side— All so old, so familiar—so new now To my marvelling eyes as we passed Invisible. _SOOTHSAY_ Eight days went by, eight days Comforted by no nights, until finally: “Would you behold yourself old, beloved?” I was pierced, yet I consented gladly For I knew it could not be otherwise. And she—“Behold yourself old! Sustained in strength, wielding might in gript surges! Not bodying the sun in weak leaps But holding way over rockish men With fern-free fingers on their little crags, Their hollows, the new Atlas, to bear them For pride and for mockery! Behold Yourself old! winding with slow might— A vine among oaks—to the thin tops: Leaving the leafless leaved, Bearing purple clusters! Behold Yourself old! birds are behind you. You are the wind coming that stills birds, Shakes the leaves in booming polyphony— Slow winning high way amid the knocking Of boughs, evenly crescendo, The din and bellow of the male wind! Leap then from forest into foam! Lash about from low into high flames Tipping sound, the female chorus— Linking all lions, all twitterings To make them nothing! Behold yourself old!” As I made to answer she continued, A little wistfully yet in a voice clear cut: “Good is my over lip and evil My under lip to you henceforth: For I have taken your soul between my two hands And this shall be as it is spoken.” _ST. JAMES’ GROVE_ And so it came to that last day When, she leading by the hand, we went out Early in the morning, I heavy of heart For I knew the novitiate was ended The ecstasy was over, the life begun. In my woolen shirt and the pale-blue necktie My grandmother gave me, there I went With the old queen right past the houses Of my friends down the hill to the river As on any usual day, any errand. Alone, walking under trees, I went with her, she with me in her wild hair, By Santiago Grove and presently She bent forward and knelt by the river, The Passaic, that filthy river. And there dabbling her mad hands, She called me close beside her. Raising the water then in the cupped palm She bathed our brows wailing and laughing: “River, we are old, you and I, We are old and by bad luck, beggars. Lo, the filth in our hair, our bodies stink! Old friend, here I have brought you The young soul you long asked of me. Stand forth, river, and give me The old friend of my revels! Give me the well-worn spirit, For here I have made a room for it, And I will return to you forthwith The youth you have long asked of me: Stand forth, river, and give me The old friend of my revels!” And the filthy Passaic consented! Then she, leaping up with a fierce cry: “Enter, youth, into this bulk! Enter, river, into this young man!” Then the river began to enter my heart, Eddying back cool and limpid Into the crystal beginning of its days. But with the rebound it leaped forward: Muddy, then black and shrunken Till I felt the utter depth of its rottenness The vile breadth of its degradation And dropped down knowing this was me now. But she lifted me and the water took a new tide Again into the older experiences, And so, backward and forward, It tortured itself within me Until time had been washed finally under, And the river had found its level And its last motion had ceased And I knew all—it became me. And I knew this for double certain For there, whitely, I saw myself Being borne off under the water! I could have shouted out in my agony At the sight of myself departing Forever—but I bit back my despair For she had averted her eyes By which I knew well what she was thinking— And so the last of me was taken. Then she, “Be mostly silent!” And turning to the river, spoke again: “For him and for me, river, the wandering, But by you I leave for happiness Deep foliage, the thickest beeches— Though elsewhere they are all dying— Tallest oaks and yellow birches That dip their leaves in you, mourning, As now I dip my hair, immemorial Of me, immemorial of him Immemorial of these our promises! Here shall be a bird’s paradise, They sing to you remembering my voice: Here the most secluded spaces For miles around, hallowed by a stench To be our joint solitude and temple; In memory of this clear marriage And the child I have brought you in the late years. Live, river, live in luxuriance Remembering this our son, In remembrance of me and my sorrow And of the new wandering!” =_The Tempers_= =_Peace on Earth_= The archer is wake! The Swan is flying! Gold against blue An Arrow is lying. There is hunting in heaven— Sleep safe till tomorrow. The Bears are abroad! The Eagle is screaming! Gold against blue Their eyes are gleaming! Sleep! Sleep safe till tomorrow. The Sisters lie With their arms intertwining; Gold against blue Their hair is shining! The Serpent writhes! Orion is listening! Gold against blue His sword is glistening! Sleep! There is hunting in heaven— Sleep safe till tomorrow. =_Postlude_= Now that I have cooled to you Let there be gold of tarnished masonry, Temples soothed by the sun to ruin That sleep utterly. Give me hand for the dances, Ripples at Philae, in and out, And lips, my Lesbian, Wall flowers that once were flame. Your hair is my Carthage And my arms the bow, And our words arrows To shoot the stars Who from that misty sea Swarm to destroy us. But you there beside me— Oh how shall I defy you, Who wound me in the night With breasts shining Like Venus and like Mars? The night that is shouting Jason When the loud eaves rattle As with waves above me Blue at the prow of my desire. O, prayers in the dark! O, incense to Poseidon! Calm in Atlantis. =_First Praise_= Lady of dusk-wood fastnesses, Thou art my Lady. I have known the crisp, splintering leaf-tread with thee on before, White, slender through green saplings; I have lain by thee on the brown forest floor Beside thee, my Lady. Lady of rivers strewn with stones, Only thou art my Lady. Where thousand the freshets are crowded like peasants to a fair; Clear-skinned, wild from seclusion They jostle white-armed down the tent-bordered thoroughfare Praising my Lady. =_Homage_= Elvira, by love’s grace There goeth before you A clear radiance Which maketh all vain souls Candles when noon is. The loud clangor of pretenders Melteth before you Like the roll of carts passing, But you come silently And homage is given. Now the little by-path Which leadeth to love Is again joyful with its many; And the great highway From love Is without passers. =_The Fool’s Song_= I tried to put a bird in a cage. O fool that I am! For the bird was Truth. Sing merrily, Truth: I tried to put Truth in a cage! And when I had the bird in the cage, O fool that I am! Why, it broke my pretty cage. Sing merrily, Truth: I tried to put Truth in a cage! And when the bird was flown from the cage, O fool that I am! Why, I had nor bird nor cage. Sing merrily, Truth: I tried to put Truth in a cage! Heigh-ho! Truth in a cage. =_From "The Birth of Venus", Song_= Come with us and play! See, we have breasts as women! From your tents by the sea Come play with us: it is forbidden! Come with us and play! Lo, bare, straight legs in the water! By our boats we stay, Then swimming away Come to us: it is forbidden! Come with us and play! See, we are tall as women! Our eyes are keen: Our hair is bright: Our voices speak outright: We revel in the sea’s green! Come play: It is forbidden! =_Immortal_= Yes, there is one thing braver than all flowers; Richer than clear gems; wider than the sky; Immortal and unchangeable; whose powers Transcend reason, love and sanity! And thou, beloved, art that godly thing! Marvelous and terrible; in glance An injured Juno roused against Heaven’s King! And thy name, lovely One, is Ignorance. =_Mezzo Forte_= Take that, damn you; and that! And here’s a rose To make it right again! God knows I’m sorry, Grace; but then, It’s not my fault if you will be a cat. =_Crude Lament_= Mother of flames, The men that went ahunting Are asleep in the snow drifts. You have kept the fire burning! Crooked fingers that pull Fuel from among the wet leaves, Mother of flames You have kept the fire burning! The young wives have fallen asleep With wet hair, weeping, Mother of flames! The young men raised the heavy spears And are gone prowling in the darkness. O mother of flames, You who have kept the fire burning! Lo, I am helpless! Would God they had taken me with them! =_An After Song_= So art thou broken in upon me, Apollo, Through a splendor of purple garments— Held by the yellow-haired Clymene To clothe the white of thy shoulders— Bare from the day’s leaping of horses. This is strange to me, here in the modern twilight. =_The Ordeal_= O crimson salamander, Because of love’s whim sacred! Swim the winding flame Predestined to disman him And bring our fellow home to us again. Swim in with watery fang, Gnaw out and drown The fire roots that circle him Until the Hell-flower dies down And he comes home again. Aye, bring him home, O crimson salamander, That I may see he is unchanged with burning— Then have your will with him, O crimson salamander. =_Appeal_= You who are so mighty, crimson salamander, hear me once more. I lay among the half-burned sticks at the edge of the fire. The fiend was creeping in. I felt the cold tips of fingers— O crimson salamander! Give me one little flame, one! that I may bind it protectingly about the wrist of him that flung me here, here upon the very center! This is my song. =_Fire Spirit_= I am old. You warm yourselves at these fires? In the center of these flames I sit, my teeth chatter! Where shall I turn for comfort? =_The Death of Franco of Cologne: His Prophecy of Beethoven_= It is useless, good woman, useless: the spark fails me. God! yet when the might of it all assails me It seems impossible that I cannot do it. Yet I cannot. They were right, and they all knew it Years ago, but I—never! I have persisted Blindly (they say) and now I am old. I have resisted Everything, but now, now the strife’s ended. The fire’s out; the old cloak has been mended For the last time, the soul peers through its tatters. Put a light by and leave me; nothing more matters Now; I am done; I am at last well broken! Yet, by God, I’ll still leave them a token That they’ll swear it was no dead man writ it; A morsel that they’ll mark well the day they bit it, That there’ll be sand between their gross teeth to crunch yet When goodman Gabriel blows his concluding trumpet. Leave me! And now, little black eyes, come you out here! Ah, you’ve given me a lively, lasting bout, year After year to win you round me darlings! Precious children, little gambollers! “farlings” They might have called you once, “nearlings” I call you now, I first of all the yearlings, Upon this plain, for I it was that tore you Out of chaos! It was I bore you! Ah, you little children that go playing Over the five-barred gate, and will still be straying Spite of all that I have ever told you Of counterpoint and cadence which does not hold you— No more than chains will for this or that strange reason, But you’re always at some new loving treason To be away from me, laughing, mocking, Witlessly, perhaps, but for all that forever knocking At this stanchion door of your poor father’s heart till—oh, well At least you’ve shown that you can grow well However much you evade me faster, faster. But, black eyes some day you’ll get a master, For he will come! He shall, he must come! And when he finishes and the burning dust from His wheels settles—what shall men see then? You, you, you, my own lovely children! Aye, all of you, thus with hands together Playing on the hill or there in a tether, Or running free, but all mine! Aye, my very namesakes Shall be his proper fame’s stakes. And he shall lead you! And he shall mead you! And he shall build you gold palaces! And he shall wine you from clear chalices! For I have seen it! I have seen it Written where the world-clouds screen it From other eyes Over the bronze gates of paradise! =_Portent_= Red cradle of the night, In you The dusky child Sleeps fast till his might Shall be piled Sinew on sinew. Red cradle of the night, The dusky child Sleeping sits upright. Lo! how The winds blow now! He pillows back; The winds are again mild. When he stretches his arms out, Red cradle of the night, The alarms shout From bare tree to tree, Wild In afright! Mighty shall he be, Red cradle of the night, The dusky child! ! =_Ad Infinitum_= Still I bring flowers Although you fling them at my feet Until none stays That is not struck across with wounds: Flowers and flowers That you may break them utterly As you have always done. Sure happily I still bring flowers, flowers, Knowing how all Are crumpled in your praise And may not live To speak a lesser thing. =_Contemporania_= The corner of a great rain Steamy with the country Has fallen upon my garden. I go back and forth now And the little leaves follow me Talking of the great rain, Of branches broken, And the farmer’s curses! But I go back and forth In this corner of a garden And the green shoots follow me Praising the great rain. We are not curst together, The leaves and I, Framing devices, flower devices And other ways of peopling The barren country. Truly it was a very great rain That makes the little leaves follow me. =_Hic Jacet_= The coroner’s merry little children Have such twinkling brown eyes. Their father is not of gay men And their mother jocular in no wise, Yet the coroner’s merry little children Laugh so easily. They laugh because they prosper. Fruit for them is upon all branches. Lo! how they jibe at loss, for Kind heaven fills their little paunches! It’s the coroner’s merry, merry children Who laugh so easily. =_Con Brio_= Miserly, is the best description of that poor fool Who holds Lancelot to have been a morose fellow, Dolefully brooding over the events which had naturally to follow The high time of his deed with Guinevere. He has a sick historical sight, if I judge rightly, To believe any such thing as that ever occurred. But, by the god of blood, what else is it that has deterred Us all from an out and out defiance of fear But this same perdamnable miserliness, Which cries about our necks how we shall have less and less Than we have now if we spend too wantonly? Bah, this sort of slither is below contempt! In the same vein we should have apple trees exempt From bearing anything but pink blossoms all the year, Fixed permanent lest their bellies wax unseemly, and the dear Innocent days of them be wasted quite. How can we have less? Have we not the deed? Lancelot thought little, spent his gold and rode to fight Mounted, if God was willing, on a good steed. =_To Wish Myself Courage_= On the day when youth is no more upon me I will write of the leaves and the moon in a tree top! I will sing then the song, long in the making— When the stress of youth is put away from me. How can I ever be written out as men say? Surely it is merely an interference with the long song— This that I am now doing. But when the spring of it is worn like the old moon And the eaten leaves are lace upon the cold earth— Then I will rise up in my great desire— Long at the birth—and sing me the youth-song! =_To Mark Anthony in Heaven_= This quiet morning light reflected, how many times from grass and trees and clouds enters my north room touching the walls with grass and clouds and trees. Anthony, trees and grass and clouds. Why did you follow that beloved body with your ships at Actium? I hope it was because you knew her inch by inch from slanting feet upward to the roots of her hair and down again and that you saw her above the battle’s fury— clouds and trees and grass— For then you are listening in heaven. =_Transitional_= First he said: It is the woman in us That makes us write— Let us acknowledge it— Men would be silent. We are not men Therefore we can speak And be conscious (of the two sides) Unbent by the sensual As befits accuracy. I then said: Dare you make this Your propaganda? And he answered: Am I not I—here? =_Sicilian Emigrant’s Song_= O—eh—lee! La—la! Donna! Donna! Blue is the sky of Palermo; Blue is the little bay; And dost thou remember the orange and fig, The lively sun and the sea-breeze at evening? Hey—la! Donna! Donna! Maria! O—eh—li! La—la! Donna! Donna! Grey is the sky of this land. Grey and green is the water. I see no trees, dost thou? The wind Is cold for the big woman there with the candle Hey—la! Donna! Donna! Maria! O—eh—li! O—la! Donna! Donna! I sang thee by the blue waters; I sing thee here in the grey dawning. Kiss, for I put down my guitar; I’ll sing thee more songs after the landing. O Jesu, I love thee! Donna! Donna! Maria! =_Le Medecin Malgre Lui_= Oh I suppose I should wash the walls of my office polish the rust from my instruments and keep them definitely in order build shelves in the laboratory empty out the old stains clean the bottles and refill them, buy another lens, put my journals on edge instead of letting them lie flat in heaps—then begin ten years back and gradually read them to date cataloguing important articles for ready reference. I suppose I should read the new books. If to this I added a bill at the tailor’s and at the cleaner’s grew a decent beard and cultivated a look of importance— Who can tell? I might be a credit to my Lady Happiness and never think anything but a white thought! =_Man in a Room_= Here, no woman, nor man besides, Nor child, nor dog, nor bird, nor wasp, Nor ditch-pool, nor green thing. Color of flower, Blood-bright berry none, nor flame-rust On leaf, nor pink gall-sting on stem, nor Staring stone, _Ay de mi!_ No hawthorn’s white thorn-tree here, nor lawn Of buttercups, nor any counterpart: Bed, book-backs, walls, floor, Flat pictures, desk, clothes-box, litter Of paper scrawls. So sit I here, So stand, so walk about. Beside The flower-white tree not so lonely I: Torn petals, dew-wet, yellowed my bare ankles. =_A Coronal_= New books of poetry will be written New books and unheard of manuscripts will come wrapped in brown paper and many and many a time the postman will blow and sidle down the leaf-plastered steps thumbing over other men’s business But we ran ahead of it all. One coming after could have seen her footprints in the wet and followed us among the stark chestnuts. Anemones sprang where she pressed and cresses stood green in the slender source— And new books of poetry will be written, leather-colored oakleaves many and many a time. =_The Revelation_= I awoke happy, the house Was strange, voices Were across a gap Through which a girl Came and paused, Reaching out to me— Then I remembered What I had dreamed— A girl One whom I knew well Leaned on the door of my car And stroked my hand— I shall pass her on the street We shall say trivial things To each other But I shall never cease To search her eyes For that quiet look— =_Portrait of a Lady_= Your thighs are appletrees whose blossoms touch the sky. Which sky? The sky where Watteau hung a lady’s slipper. Your knees are a southern breeze—or a gust of snow. Agh! what sort of man was Fragonard? —as if that answered anything. Ah, yes—below the knees, since the tune drops that way, it is one of those white summer days, the tall grass of your ankles flickers upon the shore— Which shore?— the sand clings to my lips— Which shore? Agh, petals maybe. How should I know? Which shore? Which shore? I said petals from an appletree. =_March_= • =_History_= =_March_= I Winter is long in this climate and spring—a matter of a few days only,—a flower or two picked from mud or from among wet leaves or at best against treacherous bitterness of wind, and sky shining teasingly, then closing in black and sudden, with fierce jaws. II March, you remind me of the pyramids, our pyramids— stript of the polished stone that used to guard them! March, you are like Fra Angelico at Fiesole, painting on plaster! March, you are like a band of young poets that have not learned the blessedness of warmth (or have forgotten it). At any rate— I am moved to write poetry for the warmth there is in it and for the loneliness— a poem that shall have you in it March. III See! Ashur-ban-i-pal, the archer king, on horse-back, in blue and yellow enamel! with drawn bow—facing lions standing on their hind legs, fangs bared! his shafts bristling in their necks! Sacred bulls—dragons in embossed brickwork marching—in four tiers— along the sacred way to Nebuchadnessar’s throne hall! They shine in the sun, they that have been marching— marching under the dust of ten thousand dirt years. Now— they are coming into bloom again! See them! marching still, bared by the storms from my calendar —winds that blow back the sand! winds that enfilade dirt! winds that by strange craft have whipt up a black army that by pick and shovel bare a procession to the god, Marduk! Natives cursing and digging for pay unearth dragons with upright tails and sacred bulls alternately— in four tiers— lining the way to an old altar! Natives digging at old walls— digging me warmth—digging me sweet loneliness high enamelled walls. IV My second spring— passed in a monastery with plaster walls—in Fiesole on the hill above Florence. My second spring—painted a virgin—in a blue aureole sitting on a three-legged stool, arms crossed— she is intently serious, and still watching an angel with colored wings half kneeling before her— and smiling—the angel’s eyes holding the eyes of Mary as a snake’s hold a bird’s. On the ground there are flowers, trees are in leaf. V But! now for the battle! Now for murder—now for the real thing! My third springtime is approaching! Winds! lean, serious as a virgin, seeking, seeking the flowers of March. Seeking flowers nowhere to be found, they twine among the bare branches in insatiable eagerness— they whirl up the snow seeking under it— they—the winds—snakelike roar among yellow reeds seeking flowers—flowers. I spring among them seeking one flower in which to warm myself! I deride with all the ridicule of misery— my own starved misery. Counter-cutting winds strike against me refreshing their fury! Come, good, cold fellows! Have we no flowers? Defy then with even more desperation than ever—being lean and frozen! But though you are lean and frozen— think of the blue bulls of Babylon. Fling yourselves upon their empty roses— cut savagely! But— think of the painted monastery at Fiesole. =_History_= =_History_= 1 A wind might blow a lotus petal over the pyramids—but not this wind. Summer is a dried leaf. Leaves stir this way then that on the baked asphalt, the wheels of motor cars rush over them,— gas smells mingle with leaf smells. Oh, Sunday, day of worship! ! ! The steps to the Museum are high. Worshippers pass in and out. Nobody comes here today. I come here to mingle faïence dug from the tomb, turquoise-colored necklaces and wind belched from the stomach; deliberately veined basins of agate, cracked and discolored and the stink of stale urine! Enter! Elbow in at the door. Men? Women? Simpering, clay fetish-faces counting through the turnstile. Ah! 2 This sarcophagus contained the body of Uresh-Nai, priest to the goddess Mut, Mother of All— Run your finger against this edge! —here went the chisel!—and think of an arrogance endured six thousand years Without a flaw! But love is an oil to embalm the body. Love is a packet of spices, a strong- smelling liquid to be squirted into the thigh. No? Love rubbed on a bald head will make hair—and after? Love is a lice comber! Gnats on dung! “The chisel is in your hand, the block is before you, cut as I shall dictate: This is the coffin of Uresh-Nai, priest to the Sky Goddess,—built to endure forever! Carve the inside with the image of my death in little lines of figures three fingers high. Put a lid on it cut with Mut bending over the earth, for my headpiece, and in the year to be chosen I shall rouse, the lid shall be lifted and I will walk about the temple where they have rested me and eat the air of the place: Ah—these walls are high! This is in keeping.” 3 The priest has passed into his tomb. The stone has taken up his spirit! Granite over the flesh: who will deny its advantages? Your death?—water spilled upon the ground— though water will mount again into rose-leaves— but you?—Would hold life still, even as a memory, when it is over, Benevolence is rare. Climb about this sarcophagus, read what is writ for you in these figures hard as the granite that has held them with so soft a hand the while your own flesh has been fifty times through the guts of oxen,—read! “I who am the one flesh say to you, The rose-tree will have its donor even though he give stingily. The gift of some endures ten years, the gift of some twenty and the gift of some for the time a great house rots and is torn down. Some give for a thousand years to men of one face, some for a thousand to all men and some few to all men while granite holds an edge against the weather. Judge then of love!” 4 “My flesh is turned to stone. I have endured my summer. The flurry of falling petals is ended. Lay the finger upon this granite. I was well desired and fully caressed by many lovers but my flesh withered swiftly and my heart was never satisfied. Lay your hands upon the granite as a lover lays his hand upon the thigh and upon the round breasts of her who is beside him, for now I will not wither, now I have thrown off secrecy, now I have walked naked into the street, now I have scattered my heavy beauty in the open market. Here I am with head high and a burning heart eagerly awaiting your caresses, whoever it may be, for granite is not harder than my love is open, runs loose among you! I arrogant against death! I who have endured! I worn against the years!” 5 But it is five o’clock. Come! Life is good—enjoy it! A walk in the park while the day lasts. I will go with you. Look! this northern scenery is not the Nile, but— these benches—the yellow and purple dusk— the moon there—these tired people— the lights on the water! Are not these Jews and—Ethiopians? The world is young, surely! Young and colored like—a girl that has come upon a lover! Will that do? =_Della Primavera Transportata Al Morale_= =_Della Primavera Trasportata Al Morale_= APRIL the beginning—or what you will: the dress in which the veritable winter walks in Spring— Loose it! Let it fall (where it will) —again A live thing the buds are upon it the green shoot come between the red flowerets curled back Under whose green veil strain trunk and limbs of the supporting trees— Yellow! the arched stick pinning the fragile foil —in abundance or the bush before the rose pointed with green bent into form upon the iron frame wild onion swifter than the grass the grass thick at the post’s base iris blades unsheathed— BUY THIS PROPERTY —the complexion of the impossible (you’ll say) never realized— At a desk in a hotel in front of a machine a year later—for a day or two— (Quite so—) Whereas the reality trembles frankly in that though it was like this in part it was deformed even when at its utmost to touch—as it did and fill and give and take —a kind of rough drawing of flowers and April STOP : GO —she opened the door! nearly six feet tall, and I . . . wanted to found a new country— For the rest, virgin negress at the glass in blue-glass Venetian beads— a green truck dragging a concrete mixer passes in the street— the clatter and true sound of verse— —the wind is howling the river, shining mud— Moral it looses me Moral it supports me Moral it has never ceased to flow Moral the faded evergreen Moral I can laugh Moral the redhead sat in bed with her legs crossed and talked rough stuff Moral the door is open Moral the tree moving diversely in all parts— —the moral is love, bred of the mind and eyes and hands— But in the cross-current between what the hands reach and the mind desires and the eyes see and see starvation, it is useless to have it thought that we are full— But April is a thing comes just the same— and in it we see now what then we did not know— STOP : STOP I believe in the sound patriotic and progressive Mulish policies and if elected— I believe in a continuance of the pro- tective tariff because— I believe that the country can’t do too much— I believe in honest law enforcement— and I also believe— I believe in giving the farmer and land owner adequate protection I believe I believe I believe in equality for the negro— THIS IS MY PLATFORM I believe in your love the first dandelion flower at the edge of— taraaaaaaa! taraaaaaaa! —the fishman’s bugle announces the warm wind— reminiscent of the sea the plumtree flaunts its blossom-encrusted branches— I believe Moving to three doors above—May 1st. I believe ICE—and warehouse site No parking between tree and corner You would “kill me with kindness” I love you too, but I love you too— Thus, in that light and in that light only can I say— Winter : Spring abandoned to you. The world lost— in you Is not that devastating enough for one century? I believe Spumoni $1.00 French Vanilla .70 Chocolate .70 Strawberry .70 Maple Walnut .70 Coffee .70 Tutti Frutti .70 Pistachio .70 Cherry Special .70 Orange Ice .70 Biscuit Tortoni 25c per portion trees—seeming dead: the long years— _tactus eruditus_ Maple, I see you have a squirrel in your crotch— And you have a woodpecker in your hole, Sycamore —a fat blonde, in purple (no trucking on this street) POISON! [Illustration: "Skull and Crossbones"] I believe WOMAN’S WARD [Illustration: "Arrow pointing left"] PRIVATE [Illustration: "Arrow pointing right"] The soul, my God, shall rise up —a tree But who are You? in this mortal wind that I at least can understand having sinned willingly The forms of the emotions are crystalline, geometric-faceted. So we recognize only in the white heat of understanding, when a flame runs through the gap made by learning, the shapes of things— the ovoid sun, the pointed trees lashing branches The wind is fierce, lashing the long-limbed trees whose branches wildly toss— =_Full Moon_= Blessed moon noon of night that through the dark bids Love stay— curious shapes awake to plague me Is day near shining girl? Yes, day! the warm the radiant all fulfilling day. =_The Trees_= The trees—being trees thrash and scream guffaw and curse— wholly abandoned damning the race of men— Christ, the bastards haven’t even sense enough to stay out of the rain— Wha ha ha ha Wheeeeee Clacka tacka tacka tacka tacka wha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha knocking knees, buds bursting from each pore even the trunk’s self putting out leafheads— Loose desire! we naked cry to you— “Do what you please.” You cannot! —ghosts sapped of strength wailing at the gate heartbreak at the bridgehead— desire dead in the heart haw haw haw haw —and memory broken wheeeeee There were never satyrs never maenads never eagle-headed gods— These were men from whose hands sprung love bursting the wood— Trees their companions —a cold wind winterlong in the hollows of our flesh icy with pleasure— no part of us untouched =_The Wind Increases_= The harried earth is swept The trees the tulip’s bright tips sidle and toss— Loose your love to flow Blow! Good Christ what is a poet—if any exists? a man whose words will bite their way home—being actual having the form of motion At each twigtip new upon the tortured body of thought gripping the ground a way to the last leaftip =_The Bird’s Companion_= As love that is each day upon the twig which may die So springs your love fresh up lusty for the sun the bird’s companion— =_The House_= The house is yours to wander in as you please— Your breakfasts will be kept ready for you until you choose to arise! This is the front room where we stood penniless by the hogshead of crockery. This is the kitchen— We have a new hotwater heater and a new gas-stove to please you And the front stairs have been freshly painted— white risers and the treads mahogany. Come upstairs to the bedroom— Your bed awaits you— the chiffonier waits— the whole house is waiting—for you to walk in it at your pleasure— It is yours. =_The Sea-Elephant_= Trundled from the strangeness of the sea— a kind of heaven— Ladies and Gentlemen! the greatest sea-monster ever exhibited alive the gigantic sea-elephant! O wallow of flesh were are there fish enough for that appetite stupidity cannot lessen? Sick of April’s smallness the little leaves— Flesh has lief of you enormous sea— Speak! Blouaugh! (feed me) my flesh is riven— fish after fish into his maw unswallowing to let them glide down gulching back half spittle half brine the troubled eyes—torn from the sea. (In a practical voice) They ought to put it back where it came from. Gape. Strange head— told by old sailors— rising bearded to the surface—and the only sense out of them is that woman’s Yes it’s wonderful but they ought to put it back into the sea where it came from. Blouaugh! Swing—ride walk on wires—toss balls stoop and contort yourselves— But I am love. I am from the sea— Blouaugh! there is no crime save the too-heavy body the sea held playfully—comes to the surface the water boiling about the head the cows scattering fish dripping from the bounty of . . . . and spring they say Spring is icummen in— =_Rain_= As the rain falls so does your love bathe every open object of the world— In houses the priceless dry rooms of illicit love where we live hear the wash of the rain— There paintings and fine metalware woven stuffs— all the whorishness of our delight sees from its window the spring wash of your love the falling rain— The trees are become beasts fresh-risen from the sea— water trickles from the crevices of their hides— So my life is spent to keep out love with which she rains upon the world of spring drips so spreads the words far apart to let in her love And running in between the drops the rain is a kind physician the rain of her thoughts over the ocean every where walking with invisible swift feet over the helpless waves— Unworldly love that has no hope of the world and that cannot change the world to its delight— The rain falls upon the earth and grass and flowers come perfectly into form from its liquid clearness But love is unworldly and nothing comes of it but love following and falling endlessly from her thoughts =_Death_= He’s dead the dog won’t have to sleep on his potatoes any more to keep them from freezing he’s dead the old bastard— He’s a bastard because there’s nothing legitimate in him any more he’s dead He’s sick-dead he’s a godforsaken curio without any breath in it He’s nothing at all he’s dead shrunken up to skin Put his head on one chair and his feet on another and he’ll lie there like an acrobat— Love’s beaten. He beat it. That’s why he’s insufferable— because he’s here needing a shave and making love an inside howl of anguish and defeat— He’s come out of the man and he’s let the man go— the liar Dead his eyes rolled up out of the light—a mockery which love cannot touch— just bury it and hide its face for shame. =_The Botticellian Trees_= The alphabet of the trees is fading in the song of the leaves the crossing bars of the thin letters that spelled winter and the cold have been illumined with pointed green by the rain and sun— The strict simple principles of straight branches are being modified by pinched-out ifs of color, devout conditions the smiles of love— . . . . . . until the stript sentences move as a woman’s limbs under cloth and praise from secrecy quick with desire love’s ascendancy in summer— In summer the song sings itself above the muffled words— =_An Early Martyr_= =_An Early Martyr_= Rather than permit him to testify in court Giving reasons why he stole from Exclusive stores then sent post-cards To the police to come and arrest him —if they could— They railroaded him to an asylum for The criminally insane without trial The prophylactic to madness Having been denied him he went close to The edge out of frustration and Doggedness— Inflexible, finally they had to release him— The institution was “overcrowded” They let him go in the custody of A relative on condition that he remain Out of the state— They “cured” him all right But the set-up he fought against Remains— and his youthful deed Signalizing the romantic period Of a revolt he served well Is still good— Let him be a factory whistle That keeps blaring— Sense, sense, sense! so long as there’s A mind to remember and a voice to carry it on— Never give up keep at it! Unavoided, terrifying to such bought Courts as he thought to trust to but they Double-crossed him. =_Flowers by the Sea_= When over the flowery, sharp pasture’s edge, unseen, the salt ocean lifts its form—chicory and daisies tied, released, seem hardly flowers alone but color and the movement—or the shape perhaps—of restlessness, whereas the sea is circled and sways peacefully upon its plantlike stem =_Wild Orchard_= It is a broken country, the rugged land is green from end to end; the autumn has not come. Embanked above the orchard the hillside is a wall of motionless green trees, the grass is green and red. Five days the bare sky has stood there day and night. No bird, no sound. Between the trees stillness and the early morning light. The apple trees are laden down with fruit. Among blue leaves the apples green and red upon one tree stand out most enshrined. Still, ripe, heavy, spherical and close, they mark the hillside. It is a formal grandeur, a stateliness, a signal of finality and perfect ease. Among the savage aristocracy of rocks one, risen as a tree, has turned from his repose. =_Winter_= Now the snow lies on the ground and more snow is descending upon it— Patches of red dirt hold together the old snow patches This is winter— rosettes of leather-green leaves by the old fence and bare trees marking the sky— This is winter winter, winter leather-green leaves spearshaped in the falling snow =_The Flowers Alone_= I should have to be Chaucer to describe them— Loss keeps me from such a catalogue— But! —low, the violet, scentless as it is here! higher, the peartree in full bloom through which a light falls as rain— And that is gone— Only, there remains— Now! the cherry trees white in all back yards— And bare as they are, the coral peach trees melting the harsh air— excellence priceless beyond all later fruit! And now, driven, I go, forced to another day— Whose yellow quilt flapping in the stupendous light— Forsythia, quince blossoms— and all the living hybrids =_Sea-Trout and Butterfish_= The contours and the shine hold the eye—caught and lying orange-finned and the two half its size, pout-mouthed beside it on the white dish— Silver scales, the weight quick tails whipping the streams aslant The eye comes down eagerly unravelled of the sea separates this from that and the fine fins’ sharp spines =_A Portrait of the Times_= Two W. P. A. men stood in the new sluiceway overlooking the river— One was pissing while the other showed by his red jagged face the immemorial tragedy of lack-love while an old squint-eyed woman in a black dress and clutching a bunch of late chrysanthemums to her fatted bosoms turned her back on them at the corner =_The Locust Tree in Flower_= Among of green stiff old bright broken branch come white sweet May again =_The Locust Tree in Flower_= Among the leaves bright green of wrist-thick tree and old stiff broken branch ferncool swaying loosely strung— come May again white blossom clusters hide to spill their sweets almost unnoticed down and quickly fall =_Item_= This, with a face like a mashed blood orange that suddenly would get eyes and look up and scream War! War! clutching her thick, ragged coat A piece of hat broken shoes War! War! stumbling for dread at the young men who with their gun-butts shove her sprawling— a note at the foot of the page =_View of a Lake_= from a highway below a face of rock too recently blasted to be overgrown with grass or fern: Where a waste of cinders slopes down to the railroad and the lake stand three children beside the weed-grown chassis of a wrecked car immobile in a line facing the water To the left a boy in falling off blue overalls Next to him a girl in a grimy frock And another boy They are intent watching something below—? A section sign: 50 on an iron post planted by a narrow concrete service hut (to which runs a sheaf of wires) in the universal cinders beaten into crossing paths to form the front yard of a frame house at the right that looks to have been flayed Opposite remains a sycamore in leaf Intently fixed the three with straight backs ignore the stalled traffic all eyes toward the water =_To a Mexican Pig-Bank_= and a small flock of clay sheep— a shepherd behind them—The pig is painted yellow with green ears There’s a slot at the top— Hair-pin wires hold up the sheep turning away— The shepherd wears a red blanket on his left shoulder =_To a Poor Old Woman_= munching a plum on the street a paper bag of them in her hand They taste good to her They taste good to her. They taste good to her You can see it by the way she gives herself to the one half sucked out in her hand Comforted a solace of ripe plums seeming to fill the air They taste good to her =_Late for Summer Weather_= He has on an old light grey fedora She a black beret He a dirty sweater She an old blue coat that fits her tight Grey flapping pants Red skirt and broken down black pumps Fat Lost Ambling nowhere through the upper town they kick their way through heaps of fallen maple leaves still green—and crisp as dollar bills Nothing to do. Hot cha! =_Proletarian Portrait_= A big young bareheaded woman in an apron Her hair slicked back standing on the street One stockinged foot toeing the sidewalk Her shoe in her hand. Looking intently into it She pulls out the paper insole to find the nail That has been hurting her =_Tree and Sky_= Again the bare brush of the half-broken and already-written-of tree alone on its battered hummock— Above among the shufflings of the distant cloud-rifts vaporously the unmoving blue =_The Raper from Passenack_= was very kind. When she regained her wits, he said, It’s all right, kid, I took care of you. What a mess she was in. Then he added, You’ll never forget me now. And drove her home. Only a man who is sick, she said would do a thing like that. It must be so. No one who is not diseased could be so insanely cruel. He wants to give it to someone else— to justify himself. But if I get a venereal infection out of this I won’t be treated. I refuse. You’ll find me dead in bed first. Why not? That’s the way she spoke, I wish I could shoot him. How would you like to know a murderer? I may do it. I’ll know by the end of this week. I wouldn’t scream. I bit him several times but he was too strong for me. I can’t yet understand it. I don’t faint so easily. When I came to myself and realized what had happened all I could do was to curse and call him every vile name I could think of. I was so glad to be taken home. I suppose it’s my mind—the fear of infection. I’d rather a million times have been got pregnant. But it’s the foulness of it can’t be cured. And hatred, hatred of all men —and disgust. =_Invocation and Conclusion_= January! The beginning of all things! Sprung from the old burning nest upward in the flame! I was married at thirteen My parents had nine kids and we were on the street That’s why the old bugger— He was twenty-six and I hadn’t even had my changes yet. Now look at me! =_The Yachts_= contend in a sea which the land partly encloses shielding them from the too-heavy blows of an ungoverned ocean which when it chooses tortures the biggest hulls, the best man knows to pit against its beatings, and sinks them pitilessly. Mothlike in mists, scintillant in the minute brilliance of cloudless days, with broad bellying sails they glide to the wind tossing green water from their sharp prows while over them the crew crawls ant-like, solicitously grooming them, releasing, making fast as they turn, lean far over and having caught the wind again, side by side, head for the mark. In a well guarded arena of open water surrounded by lesser and greater craft which, sycophant, lumbering and flittering follow them, they appear youthful, rare as the light of a happy eye, live with the grace of all that in the mind is fleckless, free and naturally to be desired. Now the sea which holds them is moody, lapping their glossy sides, as if feeling for some slightest flaw but fails completely. Today no race. Then the wind comes again. The yachts move, jockeying for a start, the signal is set and they are off. Now the waves strike at them but they are too well made, they slip through, though they take in canvas. Arms with hands grasping seek to clutch at the prows. Bodies thrown recklessly in the way are cut aside. It is a sea of faces about them in agony, in despair until the horror of the race dawns staggering the mind, the whole sea become an entanglement of watery bodies lost to the world bearing what they cannot hold. Broken, beaten, desolate, reaching from the dead to be taken up they cry out, failing, failing! their cries rising in waves still as the skillful yachts pass over. =_Hymn to Love Ended_= _(Imaginary translation from the Spanish)_ Through what extremes of passion had you come, Sappho, to the peace of deathless song? As from an illness, as after drought the streams released to flow filling the fields with freshness the birds drinking from every twig and beasts from every hollow— bellowing, singing of the unrestraint to colors of a waking world. So after love a music streams above it. For what is love? But music is Villon beaten and cast off Shakespeare from wisdom’s grotto looking doubtful at the world Alighieri beginning all again Goethe whom a rose ensnared Li Po the drunkard, singers whom love has overthrown— To this company the birds themselves and the sleek beasts belong and all who will besides—when love is ended to the waking of sweetest song. =_Sunday_= Small barking sounds Clatter of metal in a pan A high fretting voice and a low voice musical as a string twanged— The tempo is evenly drawn give and take A splash of water, the ting a ring of small pieces of metal dropped, the clap of a door A tune nameless as Time— Then the voices— Sound of feet barely moving Slowly And the bark, “What?” “The same, the same, the—” scrape of a chair clickaty tee— “Over Labor Day they’ll be gone” “Jersey City, he’s the engineer—” “Ya” “Being on the Erie R. R. is quite convenient” “No, I think they’re—” “I think she is. I think—” “German-American” “Of course the Govern—” · · · · · · · A distant door slammed. Amen. =_The Catholic Bells_= Tho’ I’m no Catholic I listen hard when the bells in the yellow-brick tower of their new church ring down the leaves ring in the frost upon them and the death of the flowers ring out the grackle toward the south, the sky darkened by them, ring in the new baby of Mr. and Mrs. Krantz which cannot for the fat of its cheeks open well its eyes, ring out the parrot under its hood jealous of the child ring in Sunday morning and old age which adds as it takes away. Let them ring only ring! over the oil painting of a young priest on the church wall advertising last week’s Novena to St. Anthony, ring for the lame young man in black with gaunt cheeks and wearing a Derby hat, who is hurrying to 11 o’clock Mass (the grapes still hanging to the vine along the nearby Concordia Halle like broken teeth in the head of an old man) Let them ring for the eyes and ring for the hands and ring for the children of my friend who no longer hears them ring but with a smile and in a low voice speaks of the decisions of her daughter and the proposals and betrayals of her husband’s friends. O bells ring for the ringing! the beginning and the end of the ringing! Ring ring ring ring ring ring ring! Catholic bells—! =_The Dead Baby_= Sweep the house under the feet of the curious holiday seekers— sweep under the table and the bed the baby is dead— The mother’s eyes where she sits by the window, unconsoled— have purple bags under them the father— tall, wellspoken, pitiful is the abler of these two— Sweep the house clean here is one who has gone up (though problematically) to heaven, blindly by force of the facts— a clean sweep is one way of expressing it— Hurry up! any minute they will be bringing it from the hospital— a white model of our lives a curiosity— surrounded by fresh flowers =_A Poem for Norman MacLeod_= The revolution is accomplished noble has been changed to no bull After that has sickered down slumming will be done on Park Ave. Or as chief One Horn said to the constipated prospector: You big fool! and with his knife gashed a balsam standing nearby Gathering the gum that oozed out in a tin spoon it did the trick You can do lots if you know what’s around you No bull =_Al Que Quiere_= =_(To Him Who Wants it)_= =_Sub Terra_= Where shall I find you, you my grotesque fellows that I seek everywhere to make up my band? None, not one with the earthy tastes I require; the burrowing pride that rises subtly as on a bush in May. Where are you this day, you my seven year locusts with cased wings? Ah my beauties how I long—! That harvest that shall be your advent— thrusting up through the grass, up under the weeds answering me, that will be satisfying! The light shall leap and snap that day as with a million lashes! Oh, I have you; yes you are about me in a sense: playing under the blue pools that are my windows,— but they shut you out still, there in the half light. For the simple truth is that though I see you clear enough you are not there! It is not that—it is you, you I want! —God, if I could fathom the guts of shadows! You to come with me poking into negro houses with their gloom and smell! in among children leaping around a dead dog! Mimicking onto the lawns of the rich! You! to go with me a-tip-toe, head down under heaven, nostrils lipping the wind! =_Spring Song_= Having died one is at great advantage over his fellows— one can pretend. And so, the smell of earth being upon you too— I pretend there is something temptingly foreign some subtle difference, one last amour to be divided for our death-necklaces, when I would merely lie hand in hand in the dirt with you. =_The Shadow_= Soft as the bed in the earth where a stone has lain— so soft, so smooth and so cool Spring closes me in with her arms and her hands. Rich as the smell of new earth on a stone that has lain breathing the damp through its pores— Spring closes me in with her blossomy hair brings dark to my eyes. =_Pastoral_= When I was younger it was plain to me I must make something of myself. Older now I walk back streets admiring the houses of the very poor: roof out of line with sides the yards cluttered with old chicken wire, ashes, furniture gone wrong; the fences and outhouses built of barrel-staves and parts of boxes, all, if I am fortunate, smeared a bluish green that properly weathered pleases me best of all colors. No one will believe this of vast import to the nation. =_Chicory and Daisies_= I Lift your flowers on bitter stems chicory! Lift them up out of the scorched ground! Bear no foliage but give yourself wholly to that! Strain under them you bitter stems that no beast eats— and scorn greyness! Into the heat with them: cool! luxuriant! sky-blue! The earth cracks and is shriveled up; the wind moans piteously; the sky goes out if you should fail. II I saw a child with daisies for weaving into the hair tear the stems with her teeth! =_Metric Figure_= There is a bird in the poplars! It is the sun! The leaves are little yellow fish swimming in the river. The bird skims above them, day is on his wings. Phoebus! It is he that is making the great gleam among the poplars! It is his singing outshines the noise of leaves clashing in the wind. =_Pastoral_= The little sparrows hop ingenuously about the pavement quarreling with sharp voices over those things that interest them. But we who are wiser shut ourselves in on either hand and no one knows whether we think good or evil. Meanwhile, the old man who goes about gathering dog-lime walks in the gutter without looking up and his tread is more majestic than that of the Episcopal minister approaching the pulpit of a Sunday. These things astonish me beyond words. =_Love Song_= Daisies are broken petals are news of the day stems lift to the grass tops they catch on shoes part in the middle leave root and leaves secure. Black branches carry square leaves to the wood’s top. They hold firm break with a roar show the white! Your moods are slow the shedding of leaves and sure the return in May! We walked in your father’s grove and saw the great oaks lying with roots ripped from the ground. =_Gulls_= My townspeople, beyond in the great world, are many with whom it were far more profitable for me to live than here with you. These whirr about me calling, calling! and for my own part I answer them, loud as I can, but they, being free, pass! I remain! Therefore, listen! For you will not soon have another singer. First I say this: You have seen the strange birds, have you not, that sometimes rest upon our river in winter? Let them cause you to think well then of the storms that drive many to shelter. These things do not happen without reason. And the next thing I say is this: I saw an eagle once circling against the clouds over one of our principal churches— Easter, it was—a beautiful day! three gulls came from above the river and crossed slowly seaward! Oh, I know you have your own hymns, I have heard them— and because I knew they invoked some great protector I could not be angry with you, no matter how much they outraged true music— You see, it is not necessary for us to leap at each other, and, as I told you, in the end the gulls moved seaward very quietly. =_Winter Sunset_= Then I raised my head and stared out over the blue February waste to the blue bank of hill with stars on it in strings and festoons— but above that: one opaque stone of a cloud just on the hill left and right as far as I could see; and above that a red streak, then icy blue sky! It was a fearful thing to come into a man’s heart at that time; that stone over the little blinking stars they’d set there. =_In Harbor_= Surely there, among the great docks, is peace, my mind; there with the ships moored in the river. Go out, timid child, and snuggle in among the great ships talking so quietly. Maybe you will even fall asleep near them and be lifted into one of their laps, and in the morning— There is always the morning in which to remember it all! Of what are they gossiping? God knows. And God knows it matters little for we cannot understand them. Yet it is certainly of the sea, of that there can be no question. It is a quiet sound. Rest! That’s all I care for now. The smell of them will put us to sleep presently. Smell! It is the sea water mingling here into the river— at least so it seems—perhaps it is something else—but what matter? The sea water! It is quiet and smooth here! How slowly they move, little by little trying the hawsers that drop and groan with their agony. Yes, it is certainly of the high sea they are talking. =_Tract_= I will teach you my townspeople how to perform a funeral for you have it over a troop of artists— unless one should scour the world— you have the ground sense necessary. See! the hearse leads. I begin with a design for a hearse. For Christ’s sake not black— nor white either—and not polished! Let it be weathered—like a farm wagon— with gilt wheels (this could be applied fresh at small expense) or no wheels at all: a rough dray to drag over the ground. Knock the glass out! My God—glass, my townspeople! For what purpose? Is it for the dead to look out or for us to see how well he is housed or to see the flowers or the lack of them— or what? To keep the rain and snow from him? He will have a heavier rain soon: pebbles and dirt and what not. Let there be no glass— and no upholstery, phew! and no little brass rollers and small easy wheels on the bottom— my townspeople what are you thinking of? A rough plain hearse then with gilt wheels and no top at all. On this the coffin lies by its own weight. No wreaths please— especially no hot house flowers. Some common memento is better, something he prized and is known by: his old clothes—a few books perhaps— God knows what! You realize how we are about these things my townspeople— something will be found—anything even flowers if he had come to that. So much for the hearse. For heaven’s sake though see to the driver! Take off the silk hat! In fact that’s no place at all for him— up there unceremoniously dragging our friend out to his own dignity! Bring him down—bring him down! Low and inconspicuous! I’d not have him ride on the wagon at all—damn him— the undertaker’s understrapper! Let him hold the reins and walk at the side and inconspicuously too! Then briefly as to yourselves: Walk behind—as they do in France, seventh class, or if you ride Hell take curtains! Go with some show of inconvenience; sit openly— to the weather as to grief. Or do you think you can shut grief in? What—from us? We who have perhaps nothing to lose? Share with us share with us—it will be money in your pockets. Go now I think you are ready. =_Apology_= Why do I write today? The beauty of the terrible faces of our nonentities stirs me to it: colored women day workers— old and experienced— returning home at dusk in cast off clothing faces like old Florentine oak. Also the set pieces of your faces stir me— leading citizens— but not in the same way. =_Promenade_= I Well, mind, here we have our little son beside us: a little diversion before breakfast! Come, we’ll walk down the road till the bacon will be frying. We might better be idle? A poem might come of it? Oh, be useful. Save annoyance to Flossie and besides—the wind! It’s cold. It blows our old pants out! It makes us shiver! See the heavy trees shifting their weight before it. Let us be trees, an old house, a hill with grass on it! The baby’s arms are blue. Come, move! Be quieted! II So. We’ll sit here now and throw pebbles into this water-trickle. Splash the water up! (Splash it up, Sonny!) Laugh! Hit it there deep under the grass. See it splash! Ah, mind, see it splash! It is alive! Throw pieces of broken leaves into it. They’ll pass through. No! Yes—Just! Away now for the cows! But— It’s cold! It’s getting dark. It’s going to rain. No further! III Oh, then a wreath! Let’s refresh something they used to write well of. Two fern plumes. Strip them to the mid-rib along one side. Bind the tips with a grass stem. Bend and interwist the stalks at the back. So! Ah! now we are crowned! Now we are a poet! Quickly! A bunch of little flowers for Flossie—the little ones only: a red clover, one blue heal-all, a sprig of bone-set, one primrose, a head of Indian tobacco, this magenta speck and this little lavender! Home now, my mind!— Sonny’s arms are icy, I tell you— and have breakfast! =_Libertad! Igualidad! Fraternidad!_= You sullen pig of a man you force me into the mud with your stinking ash-cart! Brother! —if we were rich we’d stick our chests out and hold our heads high! It is dreams that have destroyed us. There is no more pride in horses or in rein holding. We sit hunched together brooding our fate. Well— all things turn bitter in the end whether you choose the right or the left way and— dreams are not a bad thing. =_Summer Song_= Wanderer moon smiling a faintly ironical smile at this brilliant, dew-moistened summer morning,— a detached sleepily indifferent smile, a wanderer’s smile,— if I should buy a shirt your color and put on a necktie sky-blue where would they carry me? =_The Young Housewife_= At ten A.M. the young housewife moves about in negligee behind the wooden walls of her husband’s house. I pass solitary in my car. Then again she comes to the curb to call the ice-man, fish-man, and stands shy, uncorseted, tucking in stray ends of hair, and I compare her to a fallen leaf. The noiseless wheels of my car rush with a crackling sound over dried leaves as I bow and pass smiling. =_Love Song_= Sweep the house clean, hang fresh curtains in the windows put on a new dress and come with me! The elm is scattering its little loaves of sweet smells from a white sky! Who shall hear of us in the time to come? Let him say there was a burst of fragrance from black branches. =_Dawn_= Ecstatic bird songs pound the hollow vastness of the sky with metallic clinkings— beating color up into it at a far edge,—beating it, beating it with rising, triumphant ardor,— stirring it into warmth, quickening in it a spreading change,— bursting wildly against it as dividing the horizon, a heavy sun lifts himself—is lifted— bit by bit above the edge of things,—runs free at last out into the open—! lumbering glorified in full release upward— songs cease. =_Hero_= Fool, put your adventures into those things which break ships— not female flesh. Let there pass over the mind the waters of four oceans, the airs of four skies! Return hollow-bellied keen-eyed, hard! A simple scar or two. Little girls will come bringing you roses for your button-hole. =_Drink_= My whisky is a tough way of life: The wild cherry continually pressing back peach orchards. I am a penniless rumsoak. Where shall I have that solidity which trees find in the ground? My stuff is the feel of good legs and a broad pelvis under the gold hair ornaments of skyscrapers. =_El Hombre_= It’s a strange courage you give me ancient star: Shine alone in the sunrise toward which you lend no part! =_Winter Quiet_= Limb to limb, mouth to mouth with the bleached grass silver mist lies upon the back yards among the outhouses. The dwarf trees pirouette awkwardly to it— whirling round on one toe; the big tree smiles and glances upward! Tense with suppressed excitement the fences watch where the ground has humped an aching shoulder for the ecstasy. =_A Prelude_= I know only the bare rocks of today. In these lies my brown sea-weed,— green quartz veins bent through the wet shale; in these lie my pools left by the tide— quiet, forgetting waves; on these stiffen white star fish on these I slip barefooted! Whispers of the fishy air touch my body; “Sisters,” I say to them. =_Trees_= Crooked, black tree on your little grey-black hillock, ridiculously raised one step toward the infinite summits of the night: even you the few grey stars draw upward into a vague melody of harsh threads. Bent as you are from straining against the bitter horizontals of a north wind,—there below you how easily the long yellow notes of poplars flow upward in a descending scale, each note secure in its own posture—singularly woven. All voices are blent willingly against the heaving contra-bass of the dark but you alone warp yourself passionately to one side in your eagerness. =_Canthara_= The old black-man showed me how he had been shocked in his youth by six women, dancing a set-dance, stark naked below the skirts raised round their breasts: bellies flung forward knees flying! —while his gestures, against the tiled wall of the dingy bath-room, swished with ecstasy to the familiar music of his old emotion. =_M. B._= Winter has spent this snow out of envy, but spring is here! He sits at the breakfast table in his yellow hair and disdains even the sun walking outside in spangled slippers: He looks out: there is a glare of lights before a theater,— a sparkling lady passes quickly to the seclusion of her carriage. Presently under the dirty, wavy heaven of a borrowed room he will make reinhaled tobacco smoke his clouds and try them against the sky’s limits! =_Good Night_= In brilliant gas light I turn the kitchen spigot and watch the water plash into the clean white sink. On the grooved drain-board to one side is a glass filled with parsley— crisped green. Waiting for the water to freshen— I glance at the spotless floor—: a pair of rubber sandals lie side by side under the wall-table all is in order for the night. Waiting, with a glass in my hand —three girls in crimson satin pass close before me on the murmurous background of the crowded opera— it is memory playing the clown— three vague, meaningless girls full of smells and the rustling sounds of cloth rubbing on cloth and little slippers on carpet— high-school French spoken in a loud voice! Parsley in a glass, still and shining, brings me back. I take a drink and yawn deliciously. I am ready for bed. =_Keller Gegen Dom_= Witness, would you— one more young man in the evening of his love hurrying to confession: steps down a gutter crosses a street goes in at a doorway opens for you— like some great flower— a room filled with lamplight; or whirls himself obediently to the curl of a hill some wind-dancing afternoon; lies for you in the futile darkness of a wall, sets stars dancing to the crack of a leaf— and—leaning his head away— snuffs (secretly) the bitter powder from his thumb’s hollow, takes your blessing and goes home to bed? Witness instead whether you like it or not a dark vinegar-smelling place from which trickles the chuckle of beginning laughter. It strikes midnight. =_Danse Russe_= If when my wife is sleeping and the baby and Kathleen are sleeping and the sun is a flame-white disc in silken mists above shining trees,— if I in my north room dance naked, grotesquely before my mirror waving my shirt round my head and singing softly to myself: “I am lonely, lonely. I was born to be lonely, I am best so!” If I admire my arms, my face, my shoulders, flanks, buttocks against the yellow drawn shades,— Who shall say I am not the happy genius of my household? =_Mujer_= Oh, black Persian cat! Was not your life already cursed with offsprings? We took you for the rest to that old Yankee farm,—so lonely and with so many field mice in the long grass— and you return to us in this condition—! Oh, black Persian cat. =_Portrait of a Woman in Bed_= There’s my things drying in the corner: that blue skirt joined to the grey shirt— I’m sick of trouble! Lift the covers if you want me and you’ll see the rest of my clothes— though it would be cold lying with nothing on! I won’t work and I’ve got no cash. What are you going to do about it? —and no jewelry (the crazy fools) But I’ve my two eyes and a smooth face and here’s this! look! it’s high! There’s brains and blood in there— my name’s Robitza! Corsets can go to the devil— and drawers along with them— What do I care! My two boys? —they’re keen! Let the rich lady care for them— they’ll beat the school or let them go to the gutter— that ends trouble. This house is empty isn’t it? Then it’s mine because I need it. Oh, I won’t starve while there’s the bible to make them feed me. Try to help me if you want trouble or leave me alone— that ends trouble. The country physician is a damned fool and you can go to hell! You could have closed the door when you came in; do it when you go out. I’m tired. =_Virtue_= Now? Why— whirlpools of orange and purple flame feather twists of chrome on a green ground funneling down upon the steaming phallus-head of the mad sun himself— blackened crimson! Now? Why— it is the smile of her the smell of her the vulgar inviting mouth of her It is—Oh, nothing new nothing that lasts an eternity, nothing worth putting out to interest, nothing— but the fixing of an eye concretely upon emptiness! Come! here are— cross-eyed men, a boy with a patch, men walking in their shirts, men in hats dark men, a pale man with little black moustaches and a dirty white coat, fat men with pudgy faces, thin faces, crooked faces slit eyes, grey eyes, black eyes old men with dirty beards, men in vests with gold watch chains. Come! =_Smell!_= Oh strong-ridged and deeply hollowed nose of mine! what will you not be smelling? What tactless asses we are, you and I boney nose always indiscriminate, always unashamed, and now it is the souring flowers of the bedraggled poplars: a festering pulp on the wet earth beneath them. With what deep thirst we quicken our desires to that rank odor of a passing springtime! Can you not be decent? Can you not reserve your ardors for something less unlovely? What girl will care for us, do you think, if we continue in these ways? Must you taste everything? Must you know everything? Must you have a part in everything? =_The Ogre_= Sweet child, little girl with well-shaped legs you cannot touch the thoughts I put over and under and around you. This is fortunate for they would burn you to an ash otherwise. Your petals would be quite curled up. This is all beyond you—no doubt, yet you do feel the brushings of the fine needles; the tentative lines of your whole body prove it to me; so does your fear of me, your shyness; likewise the toy baby cart that you are pushing— and besides, mother has begun to dress your hair in a knot. These are my excuses. =_Sympathetic Portrait of a Child_= The murderer’s little daughter who is barely ten years old jerks her shoulders right and left so as to catch a glimpse of me without turning round. Her skinny little arms wrap themselves this way then that reversely about her body! Nervously she crushes her straw hat about her eyes and tilts her head to deepen the shadow— smiling excitedly! As best she can she hides herself in the full sunlight her cordy legs writhing beneath the little flowered dress that leaves them bare from mid-thigh to ankle— Why has she chosen me for the knife that darts along her smile? =_Riposte_= Love is like water or the air my townspeople; it cleanses, and dissipates evil gases. It is like poetry too and for the same reasons. Love is so precious my townspeople that if I were you I would have it under lock and key— like the air or the Atlantic or like poetry! =_K. McB._= You exquisite chunk of mud Kathleen—just like any other chunk of mud! —especially April! Curl up round their shoes when they try to step on you, spoil the polish! I shall laugh till I am sick at their amazement. Do they expect the ground to be always solid? Give them the slip then; let them sit in you; soil their pants; teach them a dignity that is dignity, the dignity of mud! Lie basking in the sun then—fast asleep! Even become dust on occasion. =_The Old Men_= Old men who have studied every leg show in the city Old men cut from touch by the perfumed music— polished or fleeced skulls that stand before the whole theater in silent attitudes of attention,— old men who have taken precedence over young men and even over dark-faced husbands whose minds are a street with arc-lights. Solitary old men for whom we find no excuses— I bow my head in shame for those who malign you. Old men the peaceful beer of impotence be yours! =_Spring Strains_= In a tissue-thin monotone of blue-grey buds crowded erect with desire against the sky tense blue-grey twigs slenderly anchoring them down, drawing them in— two blue-grey birds chasing a third struggle in circles, angles, swift convergings to a point that bursts instantly! Vibrant bowing limbs pull downward, sucking in the sky that bulges from behind, plastering itself against them in packed rifts, rock blue and dirty orange! But— (Hold hard, rigid jointed trees!) the blinding and red-edged sun-blur— creeping energy, concentrated counterforce—welds sky, buds, trees, rivets them in one puckering hold! Sticks through! Pulls the whole counter-pulling mass upward, to the right locks even the opaque, not yet defined ground in a terrific drag that is loosening the very tap-roots! On a tissue-thin monotone of blue-grey buds two blue-grey birds, chasing a third, at full cry! Now they are flung outward and up—disappearing suddenly! =_A Portrait in Greys_= Will it never be possible to separate you from your greyness? Must you be always sinking backwards into your grey-brown landscapes—and trees always in the distance, always against a grey sky? Must I be always moving counter to you? Is there no place where we can be at peace together and the motion of our drawing apart be altogether taken up? I see myself standing upon your shoulders touching a grey, broken sky— but you, weighted down with me, yet gripping my ankles,—move laboriously on, where it is level and undisturbed by colors. =_Pastoral_= If I say I have heard voices who will believe me? “None has dipped his hand in the black waters of the sky nor picked the yellow lilies that sway on their clear stems and no tree has waited long enough nor still enough to touch fingers with the moon.” I looked and there were little frogs with puffed-out throats, singing in the slime. =_January Morning_= SUITE: I I have discovered that most of the beauties of travel are due to the strange hours we keep to see them: the domes of the Church of the Paulist Fathers in Weehawken against a smoky dawn—the heart stirred— are beautiful as Saint Peters approached after years of anticipation. II Though the operation was postponed I saw the tall probationers in their tan uniforms hurrying to breakfast! III —and from basement entries neatly coiffed, middle aged gentlemen with orderly moustaches and well-brushed coats IV —and the sun, dipping into the avenues streaking the tops of the irregular red houselets, and the gay shadows dropping and dropping. V —and a young horse with a green bed-quilt on his withers shaking his head: bared teeth and nozzle high in the air! VI —and a semicircle of dirt-colored men about a fire bursting from an old ash can, VII —and the worn, blue car rails (like the sky!) gleaming among the cobbles! VIII —and the rickety ferry-boat “Arden”! What an object to be called “Arden” among the great piers,—on the ever new river! “Put me a Touchstone at the wheel, white gulls, and we’ll follow the ghost of the _Half Moon_ to the North West Passage—and through! (at Albany!) for all that!” IX Exquisite brown waves—long circlets of silver moving over you! enough with crumbling ice crusts among you! The sky has come down to you, lighter than tiny bubbles, face to face with you! His spirit is a white gull with delicate pink feet and a snowy breast for you to hold to your lips delicately! X The young doctor is dancing with happiness in the sparkling wind, alone at the prow of the ferry! He notices the curdy barnacles and broken ice crusts left at the slip’s base by the low tide and thinks of summer and green shell-crusted ledges among the emerald eel-grass! XI Who knows the Palisades as I do knows the river breaks east from them above the city—but they continue south —under the sky—to bear a crest of little peering houses that brighten with dawn behind the moody water-loving giants of Manhattan. XII Long yellow rushes bending above the white snow patches; purple and gold ribbon of the distant wood: what an angle you make with each other as you lie there in contemplation. XIII Work hard all your young days and they’ll find you too, some morning staring up under your chiffonier at its warped bass-wood bottom and your soul— out! —among the little sparrows behind the shutter. XIV —and the flapping flags are at half mast for the dead admiral. XV All this— was for you, old woman. I wanted to write a poem that you would understand. For what good is it to me if you can’t understand it? But you got to try hard— But— Well, you know how the young girls run giggling on Park Avenue after dark when they ought to be home in bed? Well, that’s the way it is with me somehow. =_To a Solitary Disciple_= Rather notice, mon cher, that the moon is tilted above the point of the steeple than that its color is shell-pink. Rather observe that it is early morning than that the sky is smooth as a turquoise. Rather grasp how the dark converging lines of the steeple meet at the pinnacle— perceive how its little ornament tries to stop them— See how it fails! See how the converging lines of the hexagonal spire escape upward— receding, dividing! —sepals that guard and contain the flower! Observe how motionless the eaten moon lies in the protecting lines. It is true: in the light colors of morning brown-stone and slate shine orange and dark blue. But observe the oppressive weight of the squat edifice! Observe the jasmine lightness of the moon. =_Ballet_= Are you not weary, great gold cross shining in the wind— are you not weary of seeing the stars turning over you and the sun going to his rest and you frozen with a great lie that leaves you rigid as a knight on a marble coffin? —and you? higher, still, robin, untwisting a song from the bare top-twigs, are you not weary of labor, even the labor of a song? Come down—join me for I am lonely. First it will be a quiet pace to ease our stiffness but as the west yellows you will be ready! Here in the middle of the roadway we will fling ourselves round with dust lilies till we are bound in their twining stems! We will tear their flowers with arms flashing! And when the astonished stars push aside their curtains they will see us fall exhausted where wheels and the pounding feet of horses will crush forth our laughter. =_Dedication for a Plot of Ground_= This plot of ground facing the waters of this inlet is dedicated to the living presence of Emily Dickinson Wellcome who was born in England, married, lost her husband and with her five year old son sailed for New York in a two-master, was driven to the Azores; ran adrift on Fire Island shoal, met her second husband in a Brooklyn boarding house, went with him to Puerto Rico bore three more children, lost her second husband, lived hard for eight years in St. Thomas, Puerto Rico, San Domingo, followed the oldest son to New York, lost her daughter, lost her “baby”, seized the two boys of the oldest son by the second marriage mothered them—they being motherless—fought for them against the other grandmother and the aunts, brought them here summer after summer, defended herself here against thieves, storms, sun, fire, against flies, against girls that came smelling about, against drought, against weeds, storm-tides, neighbors, weasels that stole her chickens, against the weakness of her own hands, against the growing strength of the boys, against wind, against the stones, against trespassers, against rents, against her own mind. She grubbed this earth with her own hands, domineered over this grass plot, blackguarded her oldest son into buying it, lived here fifteen years, attained a final loneliness and— If you can bring nothing to this place but your carcass, keep out. =_Conquest_= (_Dedicated to F. W._) Hard, chilly colors: straw-grey, frost-grey the grey of frozen ground: and you, O Sun, close above the horizon! It is I holds you— half against the sky half against a black tree trunk icily resplendent! Lie there, blue city, mine at last— rimming the banked blue-grey and rise, indescribable smoky-yellow into the overpowering white! =_First Version: 1915_= What have I to say to you When we shall meet? Yet— I lie here thinking of you. The stain of love Is upon the world. Yellow, yellow, yellow, It eats into the leaves, Smears with saffron The horned branches that lean Heavily Against a smooth purple sky. There is no light— Only a honey-thick stain That drips from leaf to leaf And limb to limb Spoiling the colors Of the whole world. I am alone. The weight of love Has buoyed me up Till my head Knocks against the sky. See me! My hair is dripping with nectar— Starlings carry it On their black wings. See at last My arms and my hands Are lying idle. How can I tell If I shall ever love you again As I do now? =_Love Song_= I lie here thinking of you:— the stain of love is upon the world! Yellow, yellow, yellow it eats into the leaves, smears with saffron the horned branches that lean heavily against a smooth purple sky! There is no light only a honey-thick stain that drips from leaf to leaf and limb to limb spoiling the colors of the whole world— you far off there under the wine-red selvage of the west! =_Fish_= • =_Romance Moderne_= =_Fish_= It is the whales that drive the small fish into the fiords. I have seen forty or fifty of them in the water at one time. I have been in a little boat when the water was boiling on all sides of us from them swimming underneath. The noise of the herring can be heard nearly a mile. So thick in the water, they are, you can’t dip the oars in. All silver! And all those millions of fish must be taken, each one, by hand. The women and children pull out a little piece under the throat with their fingers so that the brine gets inside. I have seen thousands of barrels packed with the fish on the shore. In winter they set the gill-nets for the cod. Hundreds of them are caught each night. In the morning the men pull in the nets and fish altogether in the boats. Cod so big—I have seen— that when a man held one up above his head the tail swept the ground. Sardines, mackerel, anchovies all of these. And in the rivers trout and salmon. I have seen a net set at the foot of a falls and in the morning sixty trout in it. But I guess there are not such fish in Norway nowadays. On the Lofoten Islands— till I was twelve. Not a tree or a shrub on them. But in summer with the sun never gone the grass is higher than here. The sun circles the horizon. Between twelve and one at night it is very low, near the sea, to the north. Then it rises a little, slowly, till midday, then down again and so for three months, getting higher at first, then lower, until it disappears— In winter the snow is often as deep as the ceiling of this room. If you go there you will see many Englishmen near the falls and on the bridges fishing, fishing. They will stand there for hours to catch the fish. Near the shore where the water is twenty feet or so you can see the kingflounders on the sand. They have red spots on the side. Men come in boats and stick them with long pointed poles. Have you seen how the Swedes drink tea? So, in the saucer. They blow it and turn it this way then that: so. Tall, gaunt great drooping nose, eyes dark-circled, the voice slow and smiling: I have seen boys stand where the stream is narrow a foot each side on two rocks and grip the trout as they pass through. They have a special way to hold them, in the gills, so. The long fingers arched like grapplehooks. Then the impatient silence while a little man said: The English are great sportsmen. At the winter resorts where I stayed they were always the first up in the morning, the first on with the skis. I once saw a young Englishman worth seventy million pounds— You do not know the north. —and you will see perhaps _huldra_ with long tails and all blue, from the night, and the _nekke_, half man and half fish. When they see one of them they know some boat will be lost. =_Romance Moderne_= Tracks of rain and light linger in the spongy greens of a nature whose flickering mountain—bulging nearer, ebbing back into the sun hollowing itself away to hold a lake,— or brown stream rising and falling at the roadside, turning about, churning itself white, drawing green in over it,—plunging glassy funnels fall— And—the other world— the windshield a blunt barrier: Talk to me. Sh! they would hear us. —the backs of their heads facing us— The stream continues its motion of a hound running over rough ground. Trees vanish—reappear—vanish: detached dance of gnomes—as a talk dodging remarks, glows and fades. —The unseen power of words— And now that a few of the moves are clear the first desire is to fling oneself out at the side into the other dance, to other music. Peer Gynt. Rip Van Winkle. Diana. If I were young I would try a new alignment— alight nimbly from the car, Good-bye!— Childhood companions linked two and two criss-cross: four, three, two, one. Back into self, tentacles withdrawn. Feel about in warm self-flesh. Since childhood, since childhood! Childhood is a toad in the garden, a happy toad. All toads are happy and belong in gardens. A toad to Diana! Lean forward. Punch the steersman behind the ear. Twirl the wheel! Over the edge! Screams! Crash! The end. I sit above my head— a little removed—or a thin wash of rain on the roadway —I am never afraid when he is driving,— interposes new direction, rides us sidewise, unforseen into the ditch! All threads cut! Death! Black. The end. The very end— I would sit separate weighing a small red handful: the dirt of these parts, sliding mists sheeting the alders against the touch of fingers creeping to mine. All stuff of the blind emotions. But—stirred, the eye seizes for the first time—The eye awake!— anything, a dirt bank with green stars of scrawny weed flattened upon it under a weight of air—For the first time!— or a yawning depth: Big! Swim around in it, through it— all directions and find vitreous seawater stuff— God how I love you!—or, as I say, a plunge into the ditch. The end. I sit examining my red handful. Balancing —this—in and out—agh. Love you? It’s a fire in the blood, willy-nilly! It’s the sun coming up in the morning. Ha, but it’s the grey moon too, already up in the morning. You are slow. Men are not friends where it concerns a woman. Fighters. Playfellows. White round thighs! Youth! Sighs—! It’s the fillip of novelty. It’s— Mountains. Elephants humping along against the sky—indifferent to light withdrawing its tattered shreds, worn out with embraces. It’s the fillip of novelty. It’s a fire in the blood. Oh, get a flannel shirt, white flannel or pongee. You’d look so well! I married you because I liked your nose. I wanted you! I wanted you in spite of all they’d say— Rain and light, mountain and rain, rain and river. Will you love me always? —A car overturned and two crushed bodies under it.—Always! Always! And the white moon already up. White. Clean. All the colors. A good head, backed by the eye—awake! backed by the emotions—blind— River and mountain, light and rain—or rain, rock, light, trees—divided: rain-light counter rocks—trees or trees counter rain-light-rocks or— Myriads of counter processions crossing and recrossing, regaining the advantage, buying here, selling there —You are sold cheap everywhere in town!— lingering, touching fingers, withdrawing gathering forces into blares, hummocks, peaks and rivers—river meeting rock —I wish that you were lying there dead and I sitting here beside you.— It’s the grey moon—over and over. It’s the clay of these parts. =_Sour Grapes_= =_The Late Singer_= Here it is spring again and I still a young man! I am late at my singing. The sparrow with the black rain on his breast has been at his cadenzas for two weeks past: What is it that is dragging at my heart? The grass by the back door is stiff with sap. The old maples are opening their branches of brown and yellow moth-flowers. A moon hangs in the blue in the early afternoons over the marshes. I am late at my singing. =_A Celebration_= A middle-northern March, now as always— gusts from the South broken against cold winds— but from under, as if a slow hand lifted a tide, it moves—not into April—into a second March, the old skin of wind-clear scales dropping upon the mold: this is the shadow projects the tree upward causing the sun to shine in his sphere. So we will put on our pink felt hat—new last year! —newer this by virtue of brown eyes turning back the seasons—and let us walk to the orchid-house, see the flowers will take the prize tomorrow at the Palace. Stop here, these are our oleanders. When they are in bloom— You would waste words It is clearer to me than if the pink were on the branch. It would be a searching in a colored cloud to reveal that which now, huskless, shows the very reason for their being. And these the orange-trees, in blossom—no need to tell with this weight of perfume in the air. If it were not so dark in this shed one could better see the white. It is that very perfume has drawn the darkness down among the leaves. Do I speak clearly enough? It is this darkness reveals that which darkness alone loosens and sets spinning on waxen wings— not the touch of a finger-tip, not the motion of a sigh. A too heavy sweetness proves its own caretaker. And here are the orchids! Never having seen such gaiety I will read these flowers for you; This is an old January, died—in Villon’s time. Snow, this is and this the stain of violet grew in that place the spring that foresaw its own doom. And this, a certain July from Iceland: a young woman of that place breathed it toward the South. It took root there. The color ran true but the plant is small. This falling spray of snow-flakes is a handful of dead Februaries prayed into flower by Rafael Arevalo Martinez of Guatemala. Here’s that old friend who went by my side for so many years, this full, fragile head of veined lavender. Oh that April that we first went with our stiff lusts leaving the city behind, out to the green hill— May, they said she was. A hand for all of us: this branch of blue butterflies tied to this stem. June is a yellow cup I’ll not name; August the over-heavy one. And here are— russet and shiny, all but March. And March? Ah, March— Flowers are a tiresome pastime. One has a wish to shake them from their pots root and stem, for the sun to gnaw. Walk out again into the cold and saunter home to the fire. This day has blossomed long enough. I have wiped out the red night and lit a blaze instead which will at least warm our hands and stir up the talk. I think we have kept fair time. Time is a green orchid. =_April_= If you had come away with me into another state we had been quiet together. But there the sun coming up out of the nothing beyond the lake was too low in the sky, there was too great a pushing against him, too much of sumac buds, pink in the head with the clear gum upon them, too many opening hearts of lilac leaves, too many, too many swollen limp poplar tassels on the bare branches! It was too strong in the air. I had no rest against that springtime! The pounding of the hoofs on the raw sods stayed with me half through the night. I awoke smiling but tired. =_At Night_= The stars, that are small lights— now that I know them foreign, uninterfering, like nothing in my life—I walk by their sparkle relieved and comforted. Or when the moon moves slowly up among them with flat shine then the night has a novel light in it—curved curiously in a thin half-circle =_Berket and the Stars_= A day on the boulevards chosen out of ten years of student poverty! One best day out of ten good ones. Berket in high spirits—“Ha, oranges! Let’s have one!” And he made to snatch an orange from a vendor’s cart. Now so clever was the deception, so nicely timed to the full sweep of certain wave summits, that the rumor of the thing has come down through three generations—which is relatively forever! =_A Good Night_= Go to sleep—though of course you will not— to tideless waves thundering slantwise against strong embankments, rattle and swish of spray dashed thirty feet high, caught by the lake wind, scattered and strewn broadcast in over the steady car rails! Sleep, sleep! Gulls’ cries in a wind-gust broken by the wind; calculating wings set above the field of waves breaking. Go to sleep to the lunge between foam-crests, refuse churned in the recoil. Food! Food! Offal! Offal! that holds them in the air, wave-white for the one purpose, feather upon feather, the wild chill in their eyes, the hoarseness in their voices— sleep, sleep . . . Gentlefooted crowds are treading out your lullaby. Their arms nudge, they brush shoulders, hitch this way then that, mass and surge at the crossings— lullaby, lullaby! The wild-fowl police whistles, the enraged roar of the traffic, machine shrieks: it is all to put you to sleep, to soften your limbs in relaxed postures, and that your head slip sidewise, and your hair loosen and fall over your eyes and over your mouth, brushing your lips wistfully that you may dream, sleep and dream— A black fungus springs out about lonely church doors— sleep, sleep. The night, coming down upon the wet boulevard, would start you awake with his message, to have in at your window. Pay no heed to him. He storms at your sill with cooings, with gesticulations, curses! You will not let him in. He would keep you from sleeping. He would have you sit under your desk lamp brooding, pondering; he would have you slide out the drawer, take up the ornamented dagger and handle it. It is late, it is nineteen-nineteen— go to sleep, his cries are a lullaby; his jabbering is a sleep-well-my-baby; he is a crackbrained messenger. The maid waking you in the morning when you are up and dressing the rustle of your clothes as you raise them— it is the same tune. At the table the cold, greenish, split grapefruit, its juice on the tongue, the clink of the spoon in your coffee, the toast odors say it over and over. The open street-door lets in the breath of the morning wind from over the lake. The bus coming to a halt grinds from its sullen brakes— lullaby, lullaby. The crackle of a newspaper, the movement of the troubled coat beside you— sleep, sleep, sleep, sleep . . . It is the sting of snow, the burning liquor of the moonlight, the rush of rain in the gutters packed with dead leaves: go to sleep, go to sleep. And the night passes—and never passes— =_Overture to a Dance of Locomotives_= I Men with picked voices chant the names of cities in a huge gallery: promises that pull through descending stairways to a deep rumbling. The rubbing feet of those coming to be carried quicken a grey pavement into soft light that rocks to and fro, under the domed ceiling, across and across from pale earthcolored walls of bare limestone. Covertly the hands of a great clock go round and round! Were they to move quickly and at once the whole secret would be out and the shuffling of all ants be done forever. A leaning pyramid of sunlight, narrowing out at a high window, moves by the clock; discordant hands straining out from a center: inevitable postures infinitely repeated— two—twofour—twoeight! Porters in red hats run on narrow platforms. This way ma’am! —important not to take the wrong train! Lights from the concrete ceiling hang crooked but— Poised horizontal on glittering parallels the dingy cylinders packed with a warm glow—inviting entry— pull against the hour. But brakes can hold a fixed posture till— The whistle! Not twoeight. Not twofour. Two! Gliding windows. Colored cooks sweating in a small kitchen. Taillights— In time: twofour! In time: twoeight! —rivers are tunneled: trestles cross oozy swampland: wheels repeating the same gesture remain relatively stationary: rails forever parallel return on themselves infinitely. The dance is sure. =_The Desolate Field_= Vast and grey, the sky is a simulacrum to all but him whose days are vast and grey, and— In the tall, dried grasses a goat stirs with nozzle searching the ground. —my head is in the air but who am I . . ? And amazed my heart leaps at the thought of love vast and grey yearning silently over me. =_Willow Poem_= It is a willow when summer is over, a willow by the river from which no leaf has fallen nor bitten by the sun turned orange or crimson. The leaves cling and grow paler, swing and grow paler over the swirling waters of the river as if loath to let go, they are so cool, so drunk with the swirl of the wind and of the river— oblivious to winter, the last to let go and fall into the water and on the ground. =_Approach of Winter_= The half-stripped trees struck by a wind together, bending all, the leaves flutter drily and refuse to let go or driven like hail stream bitterly out to one side and fall where the salvias, hard carmine,— like no leaf that ever was— edge the bare garden. =_January_= Again I reply to the triple winds running chromatic fifths of derision outside my window: Play louder. You will not succeed. I am bound more to my sentences the more you batter at me to follow you. And the wind, as before, fingers perfectly its derisive music. =_Blizzard_= Snow: years of anger following hours that float idly down— the blizzard drifts its weight deeper and deeper for three days or sixty years, eh? Then the sun! a clutter of yellow and blue flakes— Hairy looking trees stand out in long alleys over a wild solitude. The man turns and there— his solitary tracks stretched out upon the world. =_Complaint_= They call me and I go. It is a frozen road past midnight, a dust of snow caught in the rigid wheeltracks. The door opens. I smile, enter and shake off the cold. Here is a great woman on her side in the bed. She is sick, perhaps vomiting, perhaps laboring to give birth to a tenth child. Joy! Joy! Night is a room darkened for lovers, through the jalousies the sun has sent one gold needle! I pick the hair from her eyes and watch her misery with compassion. =_To Waken An Old Lady_= Old age is a flight of small cheeping birds skimming bare trees above a snow glaze. Gaining and failing they are buffeted by a dark wind— But what? On harsh weedstalks the flock has rested, the snow is covered with broken seedhusks and the wind tempered by a shrill piping of plenty. =_Winter Trees_= All the complicated details of the attiring and the disattiring are completed! A liquid moon moves gently among the long branches. Thus having prepared their buds against a sure winter the wise trees stand sleeping in the cold. =_The Dark Day_= A three-day-long rain from the east— an interminable talking, talking of no consequence—patter, patter, patter. Hand in hand little winds blow the thin streams aslant. Warm. Distance cut off. Seclusion. A few passers-by, drawn in upon themselves, hurry from one place to another. Winds of the white poppy! there is no escape!— An interminable talking, talking, talking . . . it has happened before. Backward, backward, backward. =_Spring Storm_= The sky has given over its bitterness. Out of the dark change all day long rain falls and falls as if it would never end. Still the snow keeps its hold on the ground. But water, water from a thousand runnels! It collects swiftly, dappled with black cuts a way for itself through green ice in the gutters. Drop after drop it falls from the withered grass-stems of the overhanging embankment. =_Thursday_= I have had my dream—like others— and it has come to nothing, so that I remain now carelessly with feet planted on the ground and look up at the sky— feeling my clothes about me, the weight of my body in my shoes, the rim of my hat, air passing in and out at my nose—and decide to dream no more. =_The Cold Night_= It is cold. The white moon is up among her scattered stars— like the bare thighs of the Police Sergeant’s wife—among her five children . . . No answer. Pale shadows lie upon the frosted grass. One answer: It is midnight, it is still and it is cold . . . ! White thighs of the sky! a new answer out of the depths of my male belly: In April . . . In April I shall see again—In April! the round and perfect thighs of the Police Sergeant’s wife perfect still after many babies. Oya! =_To Be Closely Written On A Small Piece Of Paper Which Folded Into A Tight Lozenge Will Fit Any Girl’s Locket_= Lo the leaves Upon the new autumn grass— Look at them well . ! =_The Young Laundryman_= Ladies, I crave your indulgence for My friend Wu Kee; young, agile, clear-eyed And clean-limbed, his muscles ripple Under the thin blue shirt; and his naked feet, in Their straw sandals, lift at the heels, shift and Find new postures continually. Your husband’s shirts to wash, please, for Wu Kee. =_Time The Hangman_= Poor old Abner, poor old white-haired nigger! I remember when you were so strong you hung yourself by a rope round the neck in Doc Hollister’s barn to prove you could beat the faker in the circus—and it didn’t kill you. Now your face is in your hands, and your elbows are on your knees, and you are silent and broken. =_To a Friend_= Well, Lizzie Anderson! seventeen men—and the baby hard to find a father for! What will the good Father in Heaven say to the local judge if he do not solve this problem? A little two-pointed smile and—pouff!— the law is changed into a mouthful of phrases. =_The Gentle Man_= I feel the caress of my own fingers on my own neck as I place my collar and think pityingly of the kind women I have known. =_The Soughing Wind_= Some leaves hang late, some fall before the first frost—so goes the tale of winter branches and old bones. =_Spring_= O my grey hairs! You are truly white as plum blossoms. =_Play_= Subtle, clever brain, wiser than I am, by what devious means do you contrive to remain idle? Teach me, O master. =_Lines_= Leaves are grey green, the glass broken, bright green. =_The Poor_= By constantly tormenting them with reminders of the lice in their children’s hair, the School Physician first brought their hatred down on him. But by this familiarity they grew used to him, and so, at last, took him for their friend and adviser. =_Complete Destruction_= It was an icy day, We buried the cat, then took her box and set match to it in the back yard. Those fleas that escaped earth and fire died by the cold. =_Memory of April_= You say love is this, love is that: Poplar tassels, willow tendrils the wind and the rain comb, tinkle and drip, tinkle and drip— branches drifting apart. Hagh! Love has not even visited this country. =_Daisy_= The dayseye hugging the earth in August, ha! Spring is gone down in purple, weeds stand high in the corn, the rainbeaten furrow is clotted with sorrel and crabgrass, the branch is black under the heavy mass of the leaves— The sun is upon a slender green stem ribbed lengthwise. He lies on his back— it is a woman also— he regards his former majesty and round the yellow center, split and creviced and done into minute flowerheads, he sends out his twenty rays—a little and the wind is among them to grow cool there! One turns the thing over in his hand and looks at it from the rear: brownedged, green and pointed scales armor his yellow. But turn and turn, the crisp petals remain brief, translucent, greenfastened, barely touching at the edges: blades of limpid seashell. =_Primrose_= Yellow, yellow, yellow, yellow! It is not a color. It is summer! It is the wind on a willow, the lap of waves, the shadow under a bush, a bird, a bluebird, three herons, a dead hawk rotting on a pole— Clear yellow! It is a piece of blue paper in the grass or a threecluster of green walnuts swaying, children playing croquet or one boy fishing, a man swinging his pink fists as he walks— It is ladysthumb, forget-me-nots in the ditch, moss under the flange of the carrail, the wavy lines in split rock, a great oaktree— It is a disinclination to be five red petals or a rose, it is a cluster of birdsbreast flowers on a red stem six feet high, four open yellow petals above sepals curled backward into reverse spikes— Tufts of purple grass spot the green meadow and clouds the sky. =_Queen-Ann’s-Lace_= Her body is not so white as anemone petals nor so smooth—nor so remote a thing. It is a field of the wild carrot taking the field by force; the grass does not raise above it. Here is no question of whiteness, white as can be, with a purple mole at the center of each flower. Each flower is a hand’s span of her whiteness. Wherever his hand has lain there is a tiny purple blemish. Each part is a blossom under his touch to which the fibres of her being stem one by one, each to its end, until the whole field is a white desire, empty, a single stem, a cluster, flower by flower, a pious wish to whiteness gone over— or nothing. =_Great Mullen_= One leaves his leaves at home being a mullen and sends up a lighthouse to peer from: I will have my way, yellow—A mast with a lantern, ten fifty, a hundred, smaller and smaller as they grow more—Liar, liar, liar! You come from her! I can smell djer-kiss on your clothes. Ha! you come to me, you—I am a point of dew on a grass-stem. Why are you sending heat down on me from your lantern?—You are cowdung, a dead stick with the bark off. She is squirting on us both. She has had her hand on you!—well?—She has defiled ME.—Your leaves are dull, thick and hairy.—Every hair on my body will hold you off from me. You are a dungcake, birdlime on a fencerail.— I love you, straight, yellow finger of God pointing to—her! Liar, broken weed, dungcake, you have— I am a cricket waving his antennae and you are high, grey and straight. Ha! =_Epitaph_= An old willow with hollow branches slowly swayed his few high bright tendrils and sang: Love is a young green willow shimmering at the bare wood’s edge. =_Waiting_= When I am alone I am happy. The air is cool. The sky is flecked and splashed and wound with color. The crimson phalloi of the sassafras leaves hang crowded before me in shoals on the heavy branches. When I reach my doorstep I am greeted by the happy shrieks of my children and my heart sinks. I am crushed. Are not my children as dear to me as falling leaves or must one become stupid to grow older? It seems much as if Sorrow had tripped up my heels. Let us see, let us see! What did I plan to say to her when it should happen to me as it has happened now? =_The Hunter_= In the flashes and black shadows of July the days, locked in each other’s arms, seem still so that squirrels and colored birds go about at ease over the branches and through the air. Where will a shoulder split or a forehead open and victory be? Nowhere. Both sides grow older. And you may be sure not one leaf will lift itself from the ground and become fast to a twig again. =_Arrival_= And yet one arrives somehow, finds himself loosening the hooks of her dress in a strange bedroom— feels the autumn dropping its silk and linen leaves about her ankles. The tawdry veined body emerges twisted upon itself like a winter wind . . . ! =_To a Friend Concerning Several Ladies_= You know there is not much that I desire, a few chrysanthemums half lying on the grass, yellow and brown and white, the talk of a few people, the trees, an expanse of dried leaves perhaps with ditches among them. But there comes between me and these things a letter or even a look—well placed, you understand, so that I am confused, twisted four ways and—left flat, unable to lift the food to my own mouth: Here is what they say: Come! and come! and come! And if I do not go I remain stale to myself and if I go— I have watched the city from a distance at night and wondered why I wrote no poem. Come! yes, the city is ablaze for you and you stand and look at it. And they are right. There is no good in the world except out of a woman and certain women alone for certain things. But what if I arrive like a turtle, with my house on my back or a fish ogling from under water? It will not do. I must be steaming with love, colored like a flamingo. For what? To have legs and a silly head and to smell, pah! like a flamingo that soils its own feathers behind? Must I go home filled with a bad poem? And they say: Who can answer these things till he has tried? Your eyes are half closed, you are a child, oh, a sweet one, ready to play but I will make a man of you and with love on his shoulder—! And in the marshes the crickets run on the sunny dike’s top and make burrows there, the water reflects the reeds and the reeds move on their stalks and rattle drily. =_The Disputants_= Upon the table in their bowl! in violent disarray of yellow sprays, green spikes of leaves, red pointed petals and curled heads of blue and white among the litter of the forks and crumbs and plates the flowers remain composed. Coolly their colloquy continues above the coffee and loud talk grown frail as vaudeville. =_The Birds_= The world begins again! Not wholly insufflated the blackbirds in the rain upon the dead topbranches of the living tree, stuck fast to the low clouds, notate the dawn. Their shrill cries sound announcing appetite and drop among the bending roses and the dripping grass. =_Youth and Beauty_= I bought a dishmop— having no daughter— for they had twisted fine ribbons of shining copper about white twine and made a tousled head of it, fastened it upon a turned ash stick slender at the neck straight, tall— when tied upright on the brass wallbracket to be a light for me and naked as a girl should seem to her father. =_The Thinker_= My wife’s new pink slippers have gay pom-poms. There is not a spot or a stain on their satin toes or their sides. All night they lie together under her bed’s edge. Shivering I catch sight of them and smile, in the morning. Later I watch them descending the stair, hurrying through the doors and round the table, moving stiffly with a shake of their gay pom-poms! And I talk to them in my secret mind out of pure happiness. =_The Tulip Bed_= The May sun—whom all things imitate— that glues small leaves to the wooden trees shone from the sky through bluegauze clouds upon the ground. Under the leafy trees where the suburban streets lay crossed, with houses on each corner, tangled shadows had begun to join the roadway and the lawns. With excellent precision the tulip bed inside the iron fence upreared its gaudy yellow, white and red, rimmed round with grass, reposedly. =_Spouts_= In this world of as fine a pair of breasts as ever I saw the fountain in Madison Square spouts up of water a white tree that dies and lives as the rocking water in the basin turns from the stonerim back upon the jet and rising there reflectively drops down again. =_The Widow’s Lament in Springtime_= Sorrow is my own yard where the new grass flames as it has flamed often before but not with the cold fire that closes round me this year. Thirtyfive years I lived with my husband. The plumtree is white today with masses of flowers. Masses of flowers load the cherry branches and color some bushes yellow and some red but the grief in my heart is stronger than they for though they were my joy formerly, today I notice them and turned away forgetting. Today my son told me that in the meadows, at the edge of the heavy woods in the distance, he saw trees of white flowers. I feel that I would like to go there and fall into those flowers and sink into the marsh near them. =_The Nightingales_= My shoes as I lean unlacing them stand out upon flat worsted flowers. Nimbly the shadows of my fingers play unlacing over shoes and flowers. =_Blueflags_= I stopped the car to let the children down where the streets end in the sun at the marsh edge and the reeds begin and there are small houses facing the reeds and the blue mist in the distance with grapevine trellises with grape clusters small as strawberries on the vines and ditches running springwater that continue the gutters with willows over them. The reeds begin like water at a shore their pointed petals waving dark green and light. But blueflags are blossoming in the reeds which the children pluck chattering in the reeds high over their heads which they part with bare arms to appear with fists of flowers till in the air there comes the smell of calamus from wet, gummy stalks. =_Lighthearted William_= Lighthearted William twirled his November moustaches and, half dressed, looked from the bedroom window upon the spring weather. Heigh-ya! sighed he gaily leaning out to see up and down the street where a heavy sunlight lay beyond some blue shadows. Into the room he drew his head again and laughed to himself quietly twirling his green moustaches. =_The Lonely Street_= School is over. It is too hot to walk at ease. At ease in light frocks they walk the streets to while the time away. They have grown tall. They hold pink flames in their right hands. In white from head to foot, with sidelong, idle look— in yellow, floating stuff, black sash and stockings— touching their avid mouths with pink sugar on a stick— like a carnation each holds in her hand— they mount the lonely street. =_Portrait of the Author_= The birches are mad with green points the wood’s edge is burning with their green, burning, seething—No, no, no. The birches are opening their leaves one by one. Their delicate leaves unfold cold and separate, one by one. Slender tassels hang swaying from the delicate branch tips— Oh, I cannot say it. There is no word. Black is split at once into flowers. In every bog and ditch, flares of small fire, white flowers!—Agh, the birches are mad, mad with their green. The world is gone, torn into shreds with this blessing. What have I left undone that I should have undertaken? O my brother, you redfaced, living man ignorant, stupid whose feet are upon this same dirt that I touch—and eat. We are alone in this terror, alone, face to face on this road, you and I, wrapped by this flame! Let the polished plows stay idle, their gloss already on the black soil But that face of yours—! Answer me. I will clutch you. I will hug you, grip you. I will poke my face into your face and force you to see me. Take me in your arms, tell me the commonest thing that is in your mind to say, say anything. I will understand you—! It is the madness of the birch leaves opening cold, one by one. My rooms will receive me. But my rooms are no longer sweet spaces where comfort is ready to wait on me with its crumbs. A darkness has brushed them. The mass of yellow tulips in the bowl is shrunken. Every familiar object is changed and dwarfed. I am shaken, broken against a might that splits comfort, blows apart my careful partitions, crushes my house and leaves me—with shrinking heart and startled, empty eyes—peering out into a cold world. In the spring I would drink! In the spring I would be drunk and lie forgetting all things. Your face! Give me your face, Yang Kue Fei! your hands, your lips to drink! Give me your wrists to drink— I drag you, I am drowned in you, you overwhelm me! Drink! Save me! The shad bush is in the edge of the clearing. The yards in a fury of lilac blossoms are driving me mad with terror. Drink and lie forgetting the world. And coldly the birch leaves are opening one by one. Coldly I observe them and wait for the end. And it ends. =_The Great Figure_= Among the rain and lights I saw the figure 5 in gold on a red firetruck moving tense unheeded to gong clangs siren howls and wheels rumbling through the dark city. =_Paterson_= • =_The Flower_= =_Paterson_= Before the grass is out the people are out and bare twigs still whip the wind— when there is nothing, in the pause between snow and grass in the parks and at the street ends —Say it, no ideas but in things— nothing but the blank faces of the houses and cylindrical trees bent, forked by preconception and accident split, furrowed, creased, mottled, stained secret—into the body of the light— These are the ideas, savage and tender somewhat of the music, et cetera of Paterson, that great philosopher— From above, higher than the spires, higher even than the office towers, from oozy fields abandoned to grey beds of dead grass black sumac, withered weed stalks mud and thickets cluttered with dead leaves— the river comes pouring in above the city and crashes from the edge of the gorge in a recoil of spray and rainbow mists— —Say it, no ideas but in things— and factories crystallized from its force, like ice from spray upon the chimney rocks * * * * * Say it! No ideas but in things. Mr. Paterson has gone away to rest and write. Inside the bus one sees his thoughts sitting and standing. His thoughts alight and scatter— Who are these people (how complex this mathematic) among whom I see myself in the regularly ordered plateglass of his thoughts, glimmering before shoes and bicycles—? They walk incommunicado, the equation is beyond solution, yet its sense is clear—that they may live his thought is listed in the Telephone Directory— and there’s young Alex Shorn whose dad the boot-black bought a house and painted it inside with seascapes of a pale green monochrome— the infant Dionysus springing from Apollo’s arm—the floors oakgrained in Balkan fashion—Hermes’ nose, the body of a gourmand, the lips of Cupid, the eyes the black eyes of Venus’ sister— But who! who are these people? It is his flesh making the traffic, cranking the car buying the meat— Defeated in achieving the solution they fall back among cheap pictures, furniture filled silk, cardboard shoes, bad dentistry windows that will not open, poisonous gin scurvy, toothache— . . . . . . But never, in despair and anxiety forget to drive wit in, in till it discover that his thoughts are decorous and simple and never forget that though his thoughts are decorous and simple, the despair and anxiety the grace and detail of a dynamo— Divine thought! Jacob fell backwards off the press and broke his spine. What pathos, what mercy of nurses (who keep birthday books) and doctors who can’t speak proper english— is here correctly on a spotless bed painless to the Nth power—the two legs perfect without movement or sensation Twice a month Paterson receives letters from the Pope, his works are translated into French, the clerks in the post office ungum the rare stamps from his packages and steal them for their children’s albums So in his high decorum he is wise . . . . . . What wind and sun of children stamping the snow stamping the snow and screaming drunkenly The actual, florid detail of cheap carpet amazingly upon the floor and paid for as no portrait ever was—Canary singing and geraniums in tin cans spreading their leaves reflecting red upon the frost— They are the divisions and imbalances of his whole concept, made small by pity and desire, they are—no ideas beside the facts— =_The Flower_= A petal, colorless and without form the oblong towers lie beyond the low hill and northward the great bridge stanchions, small in the distance, have appeared, pinkish and incomplete— It is the city, approaching over the river. Nothing of it is mine, but visibly for all that it is petal of a flower—my own. It is a flower through which the wind combs the whitened grass and a black dog with yellow legs stands eating from a garbage barrel. One petal goes eight blocks past two churches and a brick school beyond the edge of the park where under trees leafless now, women having nothing else to do sit in summer—to the small house in which I happen to have been born. Or a heap of dirt, if you care to say it, frozen and sunstreaked in the January sun, returning. Then they hand you—they who wish to God you’d keep your fingers out of their business—science or philosophy or anything else they can find to throw off to distract you. But Madame Lenine is a benefactress when under her picture in the papers she is quoted as saying: Children should be especially protected from religion. Another petal reaches to San Diego, California where a number of young men, New Yorkers most of them, are kicking up the dust. A flower, at its heart (the stamens, pistil, etc.) is a naked woman, about 38, just out of bed, worth looking at both for her body and her mind and what she has seen and done. She it was put me straight about the city when I said, It makes me ill to see them run up a new bridge like that in a few months and I can’t find time even to get a book written. They have the power, that’s all, she replied. That’s what you all want. If you can’t get it, acknowledge at least what it is. And they’re not going to give it to you. Quite right. For years I’ve been tormented by that miracle, the buildings all lit up— unable to say anything much to the point though it is the major sight of this region. But foolish to rhapsodize over strings of lights, the blaze of a power in which I have not the least part. Another petal reaches into the past, to Puerto Rico when my mother was a child bathing in a small river and splashing water up on the yucca leaves to see them roll back pearls. The snow is hard on the pavements. This is no more a romance than an allegory. I plan one thing—that I could press buttons to do the curing of or caring for the sick that I do laboriously now by hand for cash, to have the time when I am fresh, in the morning, when my mind is clear and burning—to write. =_Spring and All_= I =_Spring and All_= By the road to the contagious hospital under the surge of the blue mottled clouds driven from the northeast—a cold wind. Beyond, the waste of broad, muddy fields brown with dried weeds, standing and fallen patches of standing water the scattering of tall trees All along the road the reddish purplish, forked, upstanding, twiggy stuff of bushes and small trees with dead, brown leaves under them leafless vines— Lifeless in appearance, sluggish dazed spring approaches— They enter the new world naked, cold, uncertain of all save that they enter. All about them the cold, familiar wind— Now the grass, tomorrow the stiff curl of wildcarrot leaf One by one objects are defined— It quickens: clarity, outline of leaf But now the stark dignity of entrance—Still, the profound change has come upon them: rooted, they grip down and begin to awaken II =_The Pot of Flowers_= Pink confused with white flowers and flowers reversed take and spill the shaded flame darting it back into the lamp’s horn petals aslant darkened with mauve red where in whorls petal lays its glow upon petal round flamegreen throats petals radiant with transpiercing light contending above the leaves reaching up their modest green from the pot’s rim and there, wholly dark, the pot gay with rough moss. III =_The Farmer_= The farmer in deep thought is pacing through the rain among his blank fields, with hands in pockets, in his head the harvest already planted. A cold wind ruffles the water among the browned weeds. On all sides the world rolls coldly away: black orchards darkened by the March clouds— leaving room for thought. Down past the brushwood bristling by the rainsluiced wagonroad looms the artist figure of the farmer—composing —antagonist IV =_Flight to the City_= The Easter stars are shining above lights that are flashing— coronal of the black— Nobody to say it— Nobody to say: pinholes Thither I would carry her among the lights— Burst it asunder break through to the fifty words necessary— a crown for her head with castles upon it, skyscrapers filled with nut-chocolates— dovetame winds— stars of tinsel from the great end of a cornucopia of glass. V =_The Black Winds_= Black winds from the north enter black hearts. Barred from seclusion in lilies they strike to destroy— Beastly humanity where the wind breaks it— strident voices, heat quickened, built of waves Drunk with goats or pavements Hate is of the night and the day of flowers and rocks. Nothing is gained by saying the night breeds murder—It is the classical mistake The day All that enters in another person all grass, all blackbirds flying all azalea trees in flower salt winds— Sold to them men knock blindly together splitting their heads open That is why boxing matches and Chinese poems are the same—That is why Hartley praises Miss Wirt There is nothing in the twist of the wind but—dashes of cold rain It is one with submarine vistas purple and black fish turning among undulant seaweed— Black wind, I have poured my heart out to you until I am sick of it— Now I run my hand over you feeling the play of your body—the quiver of its strength— The grief of the bowmen of Shu moves nearer—There is an approach with difficulty from the dead—the winter casing of grief How easy to slip into the old mode, how hard to cling firmly to the advance— VI =_To Have Done Nothing_= No that is not it nothing that I have done nothing I have done is made up of nothing and the diphthong ae together with the first person singular indicative of the auxiliary verb to have everything I have done is the same if to do is capable of an infinity of combinations involving the moral physical and religious codes for everything and nothing are synonymous when energy _in vacuo_ has the power of confusion which only to have done nothing can make perfect VII =_The Rose_= The rose is obsolete but each petal ends in an edge, the double facet cementing the grooved columns of air—The edge cuts without cutting meets—nothing—renews itself in metal or porcelain— whither? It ends— But if it ends the start is begun so that to engage roses becomes a geometry— Sharper, neater, more cutting figured in majolica— the broken plate glazed with a rose Somewhere the sense makes copper roses steel roses— The rose carried weight of love but love is at an end—of roses It is at the edge of the petal that love waits Crisp, worked to defeat laboredness—fragile plucked, moist, half-raised cold, precise, touching What The place between the petal’s edge and the From the petal’s edge a line starts that being of steel infinitely fine, infinitely rigid penetrates the Milky Way without contact—lifting from it—neither hanging nor pushing— The fragility of the flower unbruised penetrates space. VIII =_At the Faucet of June_= The sunlight in a yellow plaque upon the varnished floor is full of a song inflated to fifty pounds pressure at the faucet of June that rings the triangle of the air pulling at the anemones in Persephone’s cow pasture— When from among the steel rocks leaps J.P.M. who enjoyed extraordinary privileges among virginity to solve the core of whirling flywheels by cutting the Gordian knot with a Veronese or perhaps a Rubens— whose cars are about the finest on the market today— And so it comes to motor cars— which is the son leaving off the g of sunlight and grass— Impossible to say, impossible to underestimate— wind, earthquakes in Manchuria, a partridge from dry leaves. IX =Young Love= What about all this writing? O “Kiki” O Miss Margaret Jarvis The backhandspring I: clean clean clean: yes . . New York Wrigley’s, appendicitis, John Marin: skyscraper soup— Either that or a bullet! Once anything might have happened You lay relaxed on my knees— the starry night spread out warm and blind above the hospital— Pah! It is unclean which is not straight to the mark— In my life the furniture eats me the chairs, the floor the walls which heard your sobs drank up my emotion— they which alone know everything and snitched on us in the morning— What to want? Drunk we go forward surely Not I beds, beds, beds elevators, fruit, night-tables breasts to see, white and blue— to hold in the hand, to nozzle It is not onion soup Your sobs soaked through the walls breaking the hospital to pieces Everything —windows, chairs obscenely drunk, spinning— white, blue, orange —hot with our passion wild tears, desperate rejoinders my legs, turning slowly end over end in the air! But what would you have? All I said was: there, you see, it is broken stockings, shoes, hairpins your bed, I wrapped myself round you— I watched. You sobbed, you beat your pillow you tore your hair you dug your nails into your sides I was your nightgown I watched! Clean is he alone after whom stream the broken pieces of the city— flying apart at his approaches but I merely caressed you curiously fifteen years ago and you still go about the city, they say patching up sick school children X =_The Eyeglasses_= The universality of things draws me toward the candy with melon flowers that open about the edge of refuse proclaiming without accent the quality of the farmer’s shoulders and his daughter’s accidental skin, so sweet with clover and the small yellow cinquefoil in the parched places. It is this that engages the favorable distortion of eyeglasses that see everything and remain related to mathematics— in the most practical frame of brown celluloid made to represent tortoiseshell— A letter from the man who wants to start a new magazine made of linen and he owns a typewriter— July 1, 1922 All this is for eyeglasses to discover. But they lie there with the gold earpieces folded down tranquilly Titicaca— XI =_The Right of Way_= In passing with my mind on nothing in the world but the right of way I enjoy on the road by virtue of the law— I saw an elderly man who smiled and looked away to the north past a house— a woman in blue who was laughing and leaning forward to look up into the man’s half averted face and a boy of eight who was looking at the middle of the man’s belly at a watchchain— The supreme importance of this nameless spectacle sped me by them without a word— Why bother where I went? for I went spinning on the four wheels of my car along the wet road until I saw a girl with one leg over the rail of a balcony XII =_Composition_= The red paper box hinged with cloth is lined inside and out with imitation leather It is the sun the table with dinner on it for these are the same Its twoinch trays have engineers that convey glue to airplanes or for old ladies that darn socks paper clips and red elastics— What is the end to insects that suck gummed labels? for this is eternity through its dial we discover transparent tissue on a spool But the stars are round cardboard with a tin edge and a ring to fasten them to a trunk for the vacation— XIII =_The Agonized Spires_= Crustaceous wedge of sweaty kitchens on rock overtopping thrusts of the sea Waves of steel from swarming backstreets shell of coral inventing electricity— Lights speckle El Greco lakes in renaissance twilight with triphammers which pulverize nitrogen of old pastures to dodge motorcars with arms and legs— The aggregate is untamed encapsulating irritants but of agonized spires knits peace where bridge stanchions rest certainly piercing left ventricles with long sunburnt fingers XIV =_Death the Barber_= Of death the barber the barber talked to me cutting my life with sleep to trim my hair— It’s just a moment he said, we die every night— And of the newest ways to grow hair on bald death— I told him of the quartz lamp and of old men with third sets of teeth to the cue of an old man who said at the door— Sunshine today! for which death shaves him twice a week XV =_Light Becomes Darkness_= The decay of cathedrals is efflorescent through the phenomenal growth of movie houses whose catholicity is progress since destruction and creation are simultaneous without sacrifice of even the smallest detail even to the volcanic organ whose woe is translatable to joy if light becomes darkness and darkness light, as it will— But schism which seems adamant is diverted from the perpendicular by simply rotating the object cleaving away the root of disaster which it seemed to foster. Thus the movies are a moral force Nightly the crowds with the closeness and universality of sand witness the selfpittle which used to be drowned in incense and intoned over by the supple-jointed imagination of inoffensiveness backed by biblical rigidity made into passion plays upon the altar to attract the dynamic mob whose female relative sweeping grass Tolstoi saw injected into the Russian nobility. XVI =_To an Old Jaundiced Woman_= O tongue licking the sore on her netherlip O toppled belly O passionate cotton stuck with matted hair elsian slobber upon the folded handkerchief I can’t die —moaned the old jaundiced woman rolling her saffron eyeballs I can’t die I can’t die XVII =_Shoot it Jimmy!_= Our orchestra is the cat’s nuts— Banjo jazz with a nickelplated amplifier to soothe the savage beast— Get the rhythm That sheet stuff ’s a lot a cheese. Man gimme the key and lemme loose— I make ’em crazy with my harmonies- Shoot it Jimmy Nobody Nobody else but me— They can’t copy it XVIII =_To Elsie_= The pure products of America go crazy— mountain folk from Kentucky or the ribbed north end of Jersey with its isolate lakes and valleys, its deaf-mutes, thieves old names and promiscuity between devil-may-care men who have taken to railroading out of sheer lust of adventure— and young slatterns, bathed in filth from Monday to Saturday to be tricked out that night with gauds from imaginations which have no peasant traditions to give them character but flutter and flaunt sheer rags—succumbing without emotion save numbed terror under some hedge of choke-cherry or viburnum— which they cannot express— Unless it be that marriage perhaps with a dash of Indian blood will throw up a girl so desolate so hemmed round with disease or murder that she’ll be rescued by an agent— reared by the state and sent out at fifteen to work in some hard-pressed house in the suburbs— some doctor’s family, some Elsie— voluptuous water expressing with broken brain the truth about us— her great ungainly hips and flopping breasts addressed to cheap jewelry and rich young men with fine eyes as if the earth under our feet were an excrement of some sky and we degraded prisoners destined to hunger until we eat filth while the imagination strains after deer going by fields of goldenrod in the stifling heat of September Somehow it seems to destroy us It is only in isolate flecks that something is given off No one to witness and adjust, no one to drive the car XIX =_Horned Purple_= This is the time of year when boys fifteen and seventeen wear two horned lilac blossoms in their caps—or over one ear What is it that does this? It is a certain sort— drivers for grocers or taxidrivers white and colored— fellows that let their hair grow long in a curve over one eye— Horned purple Dirty satyrs, it is vulgarity raised to the last power They have stolen them broken the bushes apart with a curse for the owner— Lilacs— They stand in the doorways on the business streets with a sneer on their faces adorned with blossoms Out of their sweet heads dark kisses—rough faces XX =_The Sea_= The sea that encloses her young body ula lu la lu is the sea of many arms— The blazing secrecy of noon is undone and and and the broken sand is the sound of love— The flesh is firm that turns in the sea O la la the sea that is cold with dead men’s tears— Deeply the wooing that penetrated to the edge of the sea returns in the plash of the waves— a wink over the shoulder large as the ocean— with wave following wave to the edge coom barroom— It is the cold of the sea broken upon the sand by the force of the moon— In the sea the young flesh playing floats with the cries of far off men who rise in the sea with green arms to homage again the fields over there where the night is deep— la lu la lu but lips too few assume the new—marruu Underneath the sea where it is dark there is no edge so two— XXI =_The Red Wheelbarrow_= so much depends upon a red wheel barrow glazed with rain water beside the white chickens. XXII =_Quietness_= one day in Paradise a Gypsy smiled to see the blandness of the leaves— so many so lascivious and still XXIII =_Rigamarole_= The veritable night of wires and stars the moon is in the oak tree’s crotch and sleepers in the windows cough athwart the round and pointed leaves and insects sting while on the grass the whitish moonlight tearfully assumes the attitudes of afternoon— But it is real where peaches hang recalling death’s long-promised symphony whose tuneful wood and stringish undergrowth are ghosts existing without being save to come with juice and pulp to assuage the hungers which the night reveals so that now at last the truth’s aglow with devilish peace forestalling day which dawns tomorrow with dreadful reds the heart to predicate with mists that loved the ocean and the fields— Thus moonlight is the perfect human touch. XXIV =_The Avenue of Poplars_= The leaves embrace in the trees it is a wordless world without personality I do not seek a path I am still with Gypsy lips pressed to my own— It is the kiss of leaves without being poison ivy or nettle, the kiss of oak leaves— He who has kissed a leaf need look no further— I ascend through a canopy of leaves and at the same time I descend for I do nothing unusual— I ride in my car I think about prehistoric caves in the Pyrenees— the cave of _Les Trois Frères_ XXV =_Rapid Transit_= Somebody dies every four minutes in New York State— To hell with you and your poetry— You will rot and be blown through the next solar system with the rest of the gases— What the hell do you know about it? AXIOMS Don’t get killed Careful Crossing Campaign Cross Crossings Cautiously THE HORSES black & PRANCED white Outings in New York City Ho for the open country Don’t stay shut up in hot rooms Go to one of the Great Parks Pelham Bay for example It’s on Long Island Sound with bathing, boating tennis, baseball, golf, etc. Acres and acres of green grass wonderful shade trees, rippling brooks Take the Pelham Bay Park Branch of the Lexington Ave. (East Side) Line and you are there in a few minutes Interborough Rapid Transit Co. XXVI =_At the Ball Game_= The crowd at the ball game is moved uniformly by a spirit of uselessness which delights them— all the exciting detail of the chase and the escape, the error the flash of genius— all to no end save beauty the eternal— So in detail they, the crowd, are beautiful for this to be warned against saluted and defied— It is alive, venomous it smiles grimly its words cut— The flashy female with her mother, gets it— The Jew gets it straight—it is deadly, terrifying— It is the Inquisition, the Revolution It is beauty itself that lives day by day in them idly— This is the power of their faces It is summer, it is the solstice the crowd is cheering, the crowd is laughing in detail permanently, seriously without thought XXVII =_The Hermaphroditic Telephones_= Warm rains wash away winter’s hermaphroditic telephones whose demonic bells piercing the torpid ground have filled with circular purple and green and blue anemonies the radiant nothing of crystalline spring. XXVIII =_The Wildflower_= Black eyed susan rich orange round the purple core the white daisy is not enough Crowds are white as farmers who live poorly But you are rich in savagery— Arab Indian dark woman. =_Struggle of Wings_= =_Struggle of Wings_= Roundclouds occluding patches of the sky rival steam bluntly towering, slowspinning billows which rival the resting snow, which rivals the sun beaten out upon it, flashing to a struggle (of wings) which fills the still air—still but cold—yet burning . . . It is the snow risen upon itself, it is winter pressed breast to breast with its own whiteness, transparent yet visible: Together, with their pigeon’s heads whose stupid eyes deceive no one— they hold up between them something which wants to fall to the ground . . . And there’s the river with thin ice upon it fanning out half over the black water, the free middlewater racing under its ripples that move crosswise on the stream But the wings and bodies of the pigeonlike creatures keep fluttering, turning together hiding that which is between them. It seems to rest not in their claws but upon their breasts— It is a baby! Now it is very clear (*) they’re keeping the child (naked in the air) warm and safe between them. The eyes of the birds are fixed in a bestial ecstasy. They strive together panting. It is an antithesis of logic, very theoretical. To his face the baby claps the bearded face of Socrates . . . Ho, ho! he’s dropped it. It was a mask. Now indeed the encounter throws aside all dissim- ulation. The false birdheads drop back, arms spring from the wingedges, all the parts of two women become distinct, the anatomy familiar and complete to the smallest detail: A meaning plainly antipoetical . . . and . . . all there is is won ( . . . . . . . . It is Poesy, born of a man and two women Exit No. 4, the string from the windowshade has a noose at the bottom, a noose? or a ring—bound with a white cord, knotted around the circumference in a design— And all there is is won And it is Innes on the meadows and fruit is yellow ripening in windows every minute growing brighter in the bulblight by the cabbages and spuds— And all there is is won What are black 4 a.m.'s after all but black 4 a.m.’s like anything else: a tree a fork, a leaf, a pane of glass—? And all there is is won A relic of old decency, a “very personal friend” And all there is is won (Envoi) Pic, your crows feed at your window sill asso, try and get near mine . . . And all there is is won ( . . . . . . . . All up and down the Rio Grand the sand is sand on every hand (Grand chorus and finale) ( . . . . . . . . Out of such drab trash as this by a metamorphosis bright as wallpaper or crayon or where the sun casts ray on ray on flowers in a dish, you shall weave for Poesy a gaudy sleeve a scarf, a cap and find him gloves whiter than the backs of doves . . . . Clothe him richly, those who loathe him will besmirch him fast enough. A surcease to sombre stuff— black’s black, black’s one thing but he’s not a blackbird. Bring something else for him to wear. See! he’s young he has black hair! Very well then, a red vest . . . =_The Descent of Winter_= =_The Descent of Winter_= 9/29 My bed is narrow in a small room at sea The numbers are on the wall Arabic 1 Berth No. 2 was empty above me the steward took it apart and removed it only the number remains • 2 • on an oval disc of celluloid tacked to the white-enameled woodwork with two bright nails like stars beside the moon 9/30 There are no perfect waves— Your writings are a sea full of misspellings and faulty sentences. Level. Troubled A center distant from the land touched by the wings of nearly silent birds that never seem to rest— This is the sadness of the sea— waves like words, all broken— a sameness of lifting and falling mood. I lean watching the detail of brittle crest, the delicate imperfect foam, yellow weed one piece like another— There is no hope—if not a coral island slowly forming to wait for birds to drop the seeds will make it habitable 10/9 and there’s a little blackboy in a doorway scratching his wrists The cap on his head is red and blue with a broad peak to it and his mouth is open, his tongue between his teeth— 10/10 Monday the canna flaunts its crimson head crimson lying folded crisply down upon the invisible darkly crimson heart of this poor yard the grass is long October tenth 1927 10/21 In the dead weeds a rubbish heap aflame: the orange flames stream horizontal, windblown they parallel the ground waving up and down the flamepoints alternating the body streaked with loops and purple stains while the pale smoke, above steadily continues eastward— What chance have the old? There are no duties for them no places where they may sit their knowledge is laughed at they cannot see, they cannot hear. A small bundle on the shoulders weighs them down one hand is put back under it to hold it steady. Their feet hurt, they are weak they should not have to suffer as younger people must and do there should be a truce for them 10/22 that brilliant field of rainwet orange blanketed by the red grass and oilgreen bayberry the last yarrow on the gutter white by the sandy rainwater and a white birch with yellow leaves and few and loosely hung and a young dog jumped out of the old barrel 10/28 On hot days the sewing machine whirling in the next room in the kitchen and men at the bar talking of the strike and cash 10/28 in this strong light the leafless beechtree shines like a cloud it seems to glow of itself with a soft stript light of love over the brittle grass But there are on second look a few yellow leaves still shaking far apart just one here one there trembling vividly 10/29 The justice of poverty its shame its dirt are one with the meanness of love its organ its tarpaulin the green birds the fat sleepy horse the old men the grinder sourfaced hat over eyes the beggar smiling all open the lantern out and the popular tunes— sold to the least bidder for a nickel two cents or nothing at all or even against the desire forced on us 10/30 To freight cars in the air all the slow clank, clank clank, clank moving above the treetops the wha, wha of the hoarse whistle pah, pah, pah pah, pah, pah, pah, pah piece and piece piece and piece moving still trippingly through the morningmist long after the engine has fought by and disappeared in silence to the left 11/1 The moon, the dried weeds and the Pleiades— Seven feet tall the dark, dried weedstalks make a part of the night a red lace on the blue milky sky Write— by a small lamp the Pleiades are almost nameless and the moon is tilted and halfgone And in runningpants and with ecstatic, aesthetic faces on the illumined signboard are leaping over printed hurdles and “¼ of their energy comes from bread” two gigantic highschool boys ten feet tall 11/2 Dahlias— What a red and yellow and white mirror to the sun, round and petaled is this she holds? with a red face all in black and grey hair sticking out from under the bonnet brim Is this Washington Avenue Mr. please or do I have to cross the tracks? 11/2 A MORNING IMAGINATION OF RUSSIA The earth and the sky were very close When the sun rose it rose in his heart It bathed the red cold world of the dawn so that the chill was his own The mists were sleep and sleep began to fade from his eyes, below him in the garden a few flowers were lying forward on the intense green grass where in the opalescent shadows oak leaves were pressed hard down upon it in patches by the night rain. There were no cities between him and his desires his hatreds and his loves were without walls without rooms, without elevators without files, delays of veiled murderers muffled thieves, the tailings of tedious, dead pavements, the walls against desire save only for him who can pay high, there were no cities—he was without money— Cities had faded richly into foreign countries, stolen from Russia— the richness of her cities— Scattered wealth was close to his heart he felt it uncertainly beating at that moment in his wrists, scattered wealth—but there was not much at hand Cities are full of light, fine clothes delicacies for the table, variety, novelty—fashion: all spent for this. Never to be like that again: the frame that was. It tickled his imagination. But it passed in a rising calm Tan dar a dei; Tan dar a dei! He was singing. Two miserable peasants very lazy and foolish seemed to have walked out from his own feet and were walking away with wooden rakes under the six nearly bare poplars, up the hill There go my feet. He stood still in the window forgetting to shave— The very old past was refound redirected. It had wandered into himself The world was himself, these were his own eyes that were seeing, his own mind that was straining to comprehend, his own hands that would be touching other hands They were his own! His own, feeble, uncertain. He would go out to pick herbs, he graduate of the old university. He would go out and ask that old woman, in the little village by the lake, to show him wild ginger. He himself would not know the plant. A horse was stepping up the dirt road under his window He decided not to shave. Like those two that he knew now, as he had never known them formerly. A city, fashion had been between— Nothing between now. He would go to the soviet unshaven. This was the day—and listen. Listen. That was all he did, listen to them, weigh for them. He was turning into a pair of scales, the scales in the zodiac. But closer, he was himself the scales. The local soviet. They could weigh. If it was not too late. He felt uncertain many days. But all were uncertain together and he must weigh for them out of himself. He took a small pair of scissors from the shelf and clipped his nails carefully. He himself served the fire. We have cut out the cancer but who knows? perhaps the patient will die the patient is anybody, anything worthless that I desire, my hands to have it—instead of the feeling that there is a piece of glazed paper between me and the paper—invisible but tough running through the legal processes of possession—a city, that we could possess— It’s in art, it’s in the French school. What we lacked was everything. It is the middle of everything. Not to have. We have little now but we have that. We are convalescents. Very feeble. Our hands shake. We need a transfusion. No one will give it to us, they are afraid of infection. I do not blame them. We have paid heavily. But we have gotten—touch. The eyes and the ears down on it. Close. 11/7 We must listen. Before she died she told them— I always liked to be well dressed I wanted to look nice— So she asked them to dress her well. They curled her hair . . . Now she fought She didn’t want to go She didn’t want to! 11/8 O river of my heart polluted and defamed I have compared you to that other lying in the red November grass beginning to be cleaned now from factory pollution Though at night a watchman must still prowl lest some paid hand open the waste sluices— That river will be clean before ever you will be 11/10 The shell flowers the wax grapes and peaches the fancy oak or mahogany tables the highbacked baronial chairs Or the girls’ legs agile stanchions the breasts the pinheads— —Wore my bathing suit wet four hours after sundown. That’s how. Yea? Easy to get hard to get rid of. Then unexpectedly a small house with a soaring oak leafless above it Someone should summarize these things in the interest of local government or how a spotted dog goes up a gutter— and in chalk crudely upon the railroad bridge support a woman rampant brandishing two rolling pins 11/20 Even idiots grow old in a cap with a peak over his right ear cross-eyed shamble-footed minding the three goats behind the firehouse his face is deeper lined than last year and the rain comes down in gusts suddenly 11/22 and hunters still return even through the city with their guns slung openly from the shoulder emptyhanded howbeit for the most part but aloof as if from and truly from another older world 11/28 I make really very little money. What of it? I prefer the grass with the rain on it the short grass before my headlights when I am turning the car— a degenerate trait, no doubt. It would ruin England. 12/15 What an image in the face of Almighty God is she her hands in her slicker pockets, head bowed, Tam pulled down, flat-backed, lanky-legged, loose feet kicking the pebbles as she goes =_Impromptu: The Suckers_= =_Impromptu: The Suckers_= Take it out in vile whisky, take it out in lifting your skirts to show your silken crotches; it is this that is intended. You are it. Your pleas will always be denied. You too will always go up with the two guys, scapegoats to save the Republic and especially the State of Massachusetts. The Governor says so and you ain’t supposed to ask for details— Your case has been reviewed by high-minded and unprejudiced observers (like hell they were!) the president of a great university, the president of a noteworthy technical school and a judge too old to sit on the bench, men already rewarded for their services to pedagogy and the enforcement of arbitrary statutes. In other words pimps to tradition— Why in hell didn’t they choose some other kind of “unprejudiced adviser” for their death council? instead of sticking to that autocratic strain of Boston backwash, except that the council was far from unprejudiced but the product of a rejected, discredited class long since outgrown except for use in courts and school, and that they wanted it so— Why didn’t they choose at least one decent Jew or some fair-minded Negro or anybody but such a triumvirate of inversion, the New England aristocracy, bent on working off a grudge against you, Americans, you are the suckers, you are the ones who will be going up on the eleventh to get the current shot into you, for the glory of the state and the perpetuation of abstract justice— And all this in the face of the facts: that the man who swore, and deceived the jury wilfully by so doing, that the bullets found in the bodies of the deceased could be identified as having been fired from the pistol of one of the accused—later acknowledged that he could not so identify them; that the jurors now seven years after the crime do not remember the details and have wanted to forget them; that the prosecution has never succeeded in apprehending the accomplices nor in connecting the prisoners with any of the loot stolen— The case is perfect against you, all the documents say so—in spite of the fact that it is reasonably certain that you were not at the scene of the crime, shown, quite as convincingly as the accusing facts in the court evidence, by better reasoning to have been committed by someone else with whom the loot can be connected and among whom the accomplices can be found— It’s no use, you are Americans, just the dregs. It’s all you deserve. You’ve got the cash, what the hell do you care? You’ve got nothing to lose. You are inheritors of a great tradition. My country right or wrong! You do what you’re told to do. You don’t answer back the way Tommy Jeff did or Ben Frank or Georgie Washing. I’ll say you don’t. You’re civilized. You let your betters tell you where you get off. Go ahead— But after all, the thing that swung heaviest against you was that you were scared when they copped you. Explain that you nature’s nobleman! For you know that every American is innocent and at peace in his own heart. He hasn’t a damned thing to be afraid of. He knows the government is for him. Why, when a cop steps up and grabs you at night you just laugh and think it’s a hell of a good joke— This is what was intended from the first. So take it out in your rotten whisky and silk underwear. That’s what you get out of it. But put it down in your memory that this is the kind of stuff that they can’t get away with. It is there and it’s loaded. No one can understand what makes the present age what it is. They are mystified by certain insistences. =_Collected Poems 1934_= =_All the Fancy Things_= music and painting and all that That’s all they thought of in Puerto Rico in the old Spanish days when she was a girl So that now she doesn’t know what to do with herself alone and growing old up here— Green is green but the tag ends of older things, _ma chère_ must withstand rebuffs from that which returns to the beginnings— Or what? a clean air, high up, unoffended by gross odors =_Hemmed-in Males_= The saloon is gone up the creek with the black sand round its mouth, it went floating like a backhouse on the Mississippi in flood time but it went up the creek into Limbo from whence only empty bottles ever return and that’s where George is He’s gone upstream to ask ’em to let him in at the hole in the wall where the W.C.T.U. sits knitting elastic stockings for varicose veins. Poor George he’s got a job now as janitor in Lincoln School but the saloon is gone forever with pictures of Sullivan and Kilrain on the walls and Pop Anson holding a bat. Poor George, they’ve cut out his pituitary gland and his _vas deferens_ is in the spittoon— You can laugh at him without his organs but that’s the way with a river when it wants to drown you, it sucks you in and you feel the old saloon sinking under you and you say good-by just as George did, good-by poetry the black sand’s got me, the old days are over, there’s no place any more for me to go now except home— =_Brilliant Sad Sun_= Lee’s Lunch Spaghetti Oysters a Specialty Clams and raw Winter’s done to a turn—Restaurant: Spring! Ah, Madam, what good are your thoughts romantic but true beside this gaiety of the sun and that huge appetite? Look! from a glass pitcher she serves clear water to the white chickens. What are your memories beside that purity? The empty pitcher dangling from her grip her coarse voice croaks _Bon jor’_ And Patti, on her first concert tour sang at your house in Mayaguez and your brother was there What beauty beside your sadness—and what sorrow =_It Is a Living Coral_= a trouble archaically fettered to produce _E Pluribus Unum_ an island in the sea a Capitol surmounted by Armed Liberty— painting sculpture straddled by a dome eight million pounds in weight iron plates constructed to expand and contract with variations of temperature the folding and unfolding of a lily. And Congress authorized and the Commission was entrusted was entrusted! a sculptured group Mars in Roman mail placing a wreath of laurel on the brow of Washington Commerce Minerva Thomas Jefferson John Hancock at the table Mrs. Motte presenting Indian burning arrows to Generals Marion and Lee to fire her mansion and dislodge the British— this scaleless jumble is superb and accurate in its expression of the thing they would destroy— Baptism of Poca- hontas with a little card hanging under it to tell the persons in the picture. It climbs it runs, it is Geo. Shoup of Idaho it wears a beard it fetches naked Indian women from a river Trumbull Varnum Henderson Frances Willard’s corset is absurd— Banks White Columbus stretched in bed men felling trees The Hon. Michael C. Kerr onetime Speaker of the House of Representatives Perry in a rowboat on Lake Erie changing ships the dead among the wreckage sickly green =_To_= a child (a boy) bouncing a ball (a blue ball)— He bounces it (a toy racket in his hand) and runs and catches it (with his left hand) six floors straight down— which is the old back yard =_This Florida: 1924_= of which I am the sand— one of the sands—in which the turtle eggs are baking— The people are running away toward me, Hibiscus, where I lie, sad, by the stern slaying palm trees— (They’re so much better at a distance than they are up close. Cocoanuts aren’t they? or Royal palms? They are so tall the wind rips them to shreds) —this frightened frantic pilgrimage has left my bungalows up here lonely as the Lido in April “Florida the Flowery!” Well, it’s a kind of borrowed pleasure after all (as at the movies) to see them tearing off to escape it this winter this winter that I feel So— already ten o’clock? _Vorwärts!_ e-e i-i o-o u-u a-a Shall I write it in iambs? Cottages in a row all radioed and showerbathed? But I am sick of rime— The whole damned town is riming up one street and down another, yet there is the rime of her white teeth the rime of glasses at my plate, the ripple time the rime her fingers make— And we thought to escape rime by imitation of the senseless unarrangement of wild things— the stupidest rime of all— Rather, Hibiscus, let me examine those varying shades of orange, clear as an electric bulb on fire or powdery with sediment— matt, the shades and textures of a Cubist picture the charm of fish by Hartley, orange of ale and lilies orange of topaz, orange of red hair orange of curaçoa orange of the Tiber turbid, orange of the bottom rocks in Maine rivers orange of mushrooms of Cepes that Marshal loved to cook in copper pans, orange of the sun— I shall do my pees, instead— boiling them in test tubes holding them to the light dropping in the acid— Peggy has a little albumen in hers— =_Young Sycamore_= I must tell you this young tree whose round and firm trunk between the wet pavement and the gutter (where water is trickling) rises bodily into the air with one undulant thrust half its height— and then dividing and waning sending out young branches on all sides— hung with cocoons it thins till nothing is left of it but two eccentric knotted twigs bending forward hornlike at the top =_The Cod Head_= Miscellaneous weed strands, stems, debris— firmament to fishes— where the yellow feet of gulls dabble oars whip ships churn to bubbles— at night wildly agitate phospores- cent midges—but by day flaccid moons in whose discs sometimes a red cross lives—four fathom—the bottom skids a mottle of green sands backward— amorphous waver- ing rocks—three fathom the vitreous body through which— small scudding fish deep down—and now a lulling lift and fall— red stars—a severed cod— head between two green stones—lifting falling =_New England_= is a condition— of bedrooms whose electricity is brickish or made into T beams—They dangle them on wire cables to the tops of Woolworth buildings five and ten cents worth— There they have bolted them into place at masculine risk— Or a boy with a rose under the lintel of his cap standing to have his picture taken on the butt of a girder with the city a mile down— captured, lonely cock atop iron girders wears rosepetal smile—a thought of Indians on chestnut branches to end “walking on the air” =_The Bull_= It is in captivity— ringed, haltered, chained to a drag the bull is godlike Unlike the cows he lives alone, nozzles the sweet grass gingerly to pass the time away He kneels, lies down and stretching out a foreleg licks himself about the hoof then stays with half-closed eyes, Olympian commentary on the bright passage of days. —The round sun smooth his lacquer through the glossy pinetrees his substance hard as ivory or glass— through which the wind yet plays— milkless he nods the hair between his horns and eyes matted with hyacinthine curls =_In the ’Sconset Bus_= Upon the fallen cheek a gauzy down— And on the nape —indecently a mat of yellow hair stuck with celluloid pins not quite matching it —that’s two shades darker at the roots Hanging from the ears the hooks piercing the flesh— gold and semi- precious stones— And in her lap the dog (Youth) resting his head on the ample shoulder his bright mouth agape pants restlessly backward =_Poem_= As the cat climbed over the top of the jamcloset first the right forefoot carefully then the hind stepped down into the pit of the empty flowerpot =_Sluggishly_= or with a rush the river flows— and none is unaffected— Think: the clear stream boiling at the boat’s wake or— a stench your choice is— And respond? crapulous —having eaten fouling the water grass =_The Jungle_= It is not the still weight of the trees, the breathless interior of the wood, tangled with wrist-thick vines, the flies, reptiles, the forever fearful monkeys screaming and running in the branches— but a girl waiting shy, brown, soft-eyed— to guide you Upstairs, sir. =_Between Walls_= the back wings of the hospital where nothing will grow lie cinders in which shine the broken pieces of a green bottle =_The Lily_= The branching head of tiger-lilies through the window in the air— A humming bird is still on whirring wings above the flowers— By spotted petals curling back and tongues that hang the air is seen— It’s raining— water’s caught among the curled-back petals Caught and held and there’s a fly— are blossoming =_On Gay Wallpaper_= The green-blue ground is ruled with silver lines to say the sun is shining And on this moral sea of grass or dreams lie flowers or baskets of desires Heaven knows what they are between cerulean shapes laid regularly round Mat roses and tridentate leaves of gold threes, threes and threes Three roses and three stems the basket floating standing in the horns of blue Repeated to the ceiling to the windows where the day Blows in the scalloped curtains to the sound of rain =_The Source_= I The slope of the heavy woods pales and disappears in the wall of mist that hides the edge above whose peak last night the moon— But it is morning and a new light marks other things a pasture which begins where silhouettes of scrub and balsams stand uncertainly On whose green three maples are distinctly pressed beside a red barn with new shingles in the old all cancelled by A triple elm’s inverted lichen mottled triple thighs from which wisps of twigs droop with sharp leaves Which shake in the crotch brushing the stained bark fitfully II Beyond which lies the profound detail of the woods restless, distressed soft underfoot the low ferns Mounting a rusty root the pungent mould globular fungi water in an old hoof print Cow dung and in the uneven aisles of the trees rock strewn a stone half-green A spring in whose depth white sand bubbles overflows clear under late raspberries and delicate-stemmed touch-me-nots Where alders follow it marking the low ground the water is cast upon a stair of uneven stones with a rustling sound An edge of bubbles stirs swiftness is moulded speed grows the profuse body advances over the stones unchanged =_Nantucket_= Flowers through the window lavender and yellow changed by white curtains— Smell of cleanliness— Sunshine of late afternoon— On the glass tray a glass pitcher, the tumbler turned down, by which a key is lying—And the immaculate white bed =_The Winds_= flowing edge to edge their clear edges meeting— the winds of this northern March— blow the bark from the trees the soil from the field the hair from the heads of girls, the shirts from the backs of the men, roofs from the houses, the cross from the church, clouds from the sky the fur from the faces of wild animals, crusts from scabby eyes, scales from the mind and husbands from wives =_Lines on Receiving the Dial’s Award: 1927_= In the common mind, a corked bottle, that senate’s egg, today the prohibition we all feel has been a little lifted The sick carpenter fished up another bottle, empty from his cellar for me last week, an old ginflask— What a beauty! a fat quartflask of greenish glass, _The Father of His Country_ embossed upon the side of it in glass letters capping the green profile and on the other _A little more Grape Captain Bragg_ A noteworthy antithesis, that, to petty thievery on a large scale: generous out of the sand, good to hold and to see— It approaches poetry and my delight at having been even for a moment shored against a degradation ticked off daily round me like the newspapers An old, empty bottle in my hand I go through the motions of drinking, drinking to _The Dial_ and its courtesy =_The Red Lily_= To the bob-white’s call and drone of reaper tumbling daisies in the sun— one by one about the smutting panels of white doors grey shingles slip and fall— But you, a loveliness of even lines curving to the throat, the crossroads is your home. You are, upon your steady stem one trumpeted wide flower slightly tilted above a scale of buds— Sometimes a farmer’s wife gathers an armful for her pitcher on the porch— Topping a stone wall against the shale-ledge a field full— By the road, the river the edge of the woods —opening in the sun closing with the dark— everywhere Red Lily in your common cup all beauty lies— =_Interests of 1926_= It is spring and we walk up the filthysweet worn wooden stairs to it, close by the miniature bright poplar leaves at a grimy window wading . . . over the boards of the second floor . . . in the clear smile of the boyish husband all compassion for her injury . . . . and such is the celebrated May =_The Attic Which Is Desire_= the unused tent of bare beams beyond which directly wait the night and day— Here from the street by * * * * S * * O * * D * * A * * * * ringed with running lights the darkened pane exactly down the center is transfixed =_This Is Just to Say_= I have eaten the plums that were in the icebox and which you were probably saving for breakfast Forgive me they were delicious so sweet and so cold =_Birds and Flowers_= I It is summer, winter, any time— no time at all—but delight the springing up of those secret flowers the others imitate and so become round extraordinary in petalage yellow, blue fluted and globed slendercrimson moonshaped— in clusters on a wall. Come! And just now you will not come, your ankles carry you another way, as thought grown old—or older—in your eyes fire them against me—small flowers birds flitting here and there between twigs II What have I done to drive you away? It is winter, true enough, but this day I love you. This day there is no time at all more than in under my ribs where anatomists say the heart is— And just today you will not have me. Well, tomorrow it may be snowing— I’ll keep after you, your repulse of me is no more than a rebuff to the weather— If we make a desert of ourselves—we make a desert . . . III Nothing is lost! the white shellwhite glassy, linenwhite, crystalwhite crocuses with orange centers the purple crocus with an orange center, the yellow crocus with a yellow center— That which was large but seemed spent of power to fill the world with its wave of splendor is overflowing again into every corner— Though the eye turns inward, the mind has spread its embrace—in a wind that roughs the stiff petals— More! the particular flower is blossoming . . . =_An Elegy for D. H. Lawrence_= =_An Elegy for D. H. Lawrence_= Green points on the shrub and poor Lawrence dead. The night damp and misty and Lawrence no more in the world to answer April’s promise with a fury of labor against waste, waste and life’s coldness. Once he received a letter— he never answered it— praising him: so English he had thereby raised himself to an unenglish greatness. Dead now and it grows clearer what bitterness drove him. This is the time. The serpent in the grotto water dripping from the stone into a pool. Mediterranean evenings. Ashes of Cretan fires. And to the north forsythia hung with yellow bells in the cold. Poor Lawrence worn with a fury of sad labor to create summer from spring’s decay. English women. Men driven not to love but to the ends of the earth. The serpent turning his stone-like head, the fixed agate eyes turn also. And unopened jonquils hang their folded heads. No summer. But for Lawrence full praise in this half cold half season— before trees are in leaf and tufted grass stars unevenly the bare ground. Slowly the serpent leans to drink by the tinkling water the forked tongue alert, Then fold after fold, glassy strength, passing a given point, as by desire drawn forward bodily, he glides smoothly in. To stand by the sea or walk again along a river’s bank and talk with a companion, to halt watching where the edge of water meets and lies upon the unmoving shore— Flood waters rise, and will rise, rip the quiet valley trap the gypsy and the girl She clings drowning to a bush in flower. Remember, now, Lawrence dead. Blue squills in bloom—to the scorched aridity of the Mexican plateau. Or baked public squares in the cities of Mediterranean islands where one waits for busses and boats come slowly along the water arriving. But the sweep of spring over temperate lands, meadows and woods where the young walk and talk incompletely, straining to no summer, hearing the frogs, speaking of birds and insects— Febrile spring moves not to heat but always more slowly, burdened by a weight of leaves. Nothing now to burst the bounds— remains confined by them. Heat, heat! Unknown. Poor Lawrence, dead and only the drowned fallen dancing from the deck of a pleasure boat unfading desire. Rabbits, imaginings, the drama, literature, satire. The serpent cannot move his stony eyes, scarcely sees but touching the air with his forked tongue surmises and his body which dipped into the cold water is gone. Violently the satiric sun that leads April not to the panting dance but to stillness in, into the brain, dips and is gone also. And sisters return through the dusk to the measured rancor of their unbending elders. Greep, greep, greep the cricket chants where the snake with agate eyes leaned to the water. Sorrow to the young that Lawrence has passed unwanted from England. And in the gardens forsythia and in the woods now the crinkled spice-bush in flower. =_Adam and Eve and the City_= =_To a Wood Thrush_= Singing across the orchard before night, answered from the depths of the wood, inversely and in a lower key— First I tried to write conventionally praising you but found it no more than my own thoughts that I was giving. No. What can I say? Vistas of delight waking suddenly before a cheated world. =_Fine Work with Pitch and Copper_= Now they are resting in the fleckless light separately in unison like the sacks of sifted stone stacked regularly by twos about the flat roof ready after lunch to be opened and strewn The copper in eight foot strips has been beaten lengthwise down the center at right angles and lies ready to edge the coping One still chewing picks up a copper strip and runs his eye along it =_Young Woman at a Window_= She sits with tears on her cheek her cheek on her hand the child in her lap his nose pressed to the glass =_The Rose_= First the warmth, variability color and frailty A grace of petals skirting the tight-whorled cone Come to generous abandon— to the mind as to the eye Wide! Wider! Wide as if panting, until the gold hawk’s-eye speaks once coldly its perfection =_A Chinese Toy_= Six whittled chickens on a wooden bat that peck within a circle pulled by strings fast to a hanging weight when shuttled by the playful hand =_La Belle Dame de Tous les Jours_= It speaks, it moves there is a sound and alteration— The hair about the brow, the eyes symmetrically turn— This has no part in what has been but smiles in selfishness unique— against the snow new-fallen beyond the tropic window-sill =_Adam_= He grew up by the sea on a hot island inhabited by negroes—mostly. There he built himself a boat and a separate room close to the water for a piano on which he practiced— by sheer doggedness and strength of purpose striving like an Englishman to emulate his Spanish friend and idol—the weather! And there he learned to play the flute—not very well— Thence he was driven out of Paradise—to taste the death that duty brings so daintily, so mincingly, with such a noble air— that enslaved him all his life thereafter— And he left behind all the curious memories that come with shells and hurricanes— the smells and sounds and glancing looks that Latins know belong to boredom and long torrid hours and Englishmen will never understand—whom duty has marked for special mention—with a tropic of its own and its own heavy-winged fowl and flowers that vomit beauty at midnight— But the Latin has turned romance to a purpose cold as ice. He never sees or seldom what melted Adam’s knees to jelly and despair—and held them up pontifically— Underneath the whisperings of tropic nights there is a darker whispering that death invents especially for northern men whom the tropics have come to hold. It would have been enough to know that never, never, never, never would peace come as the sun comes in the hot islands. But there was a special hell besides where black women lie waiting for a boy— Naked on a raft he could see the barracudas waiting to castrate him so the saying went— Circumstances take longer— But being an Englishman though he had not lived in England _desde que avia cinco años_ he never turned back but kept a cold eye always on the inevitable end never wincing—never to unbend— God’s handyman going quietly into hell’s mouth for a paper of reference— fetching water to posterity a British passport always in his pocket— muleback over Costa Rica eating pâtés of black ants And the Latin ladies admired him and under their smiles dartled the dagger of despair— in spite of a most thorough trial— found his English heart safe in the roseate steel. Duty the angel which with whip in hand . . . —along the low wall of paradise where they sat and smiled and flipped their fans at him— He never had but the one home Staring Him in the eye coldly and with patience— without a murmur, silently a desperate, unvarying silence to the unhurried last. =_Eve_= Pardon my injuries now that you are old— Forgive me my awkwardnesses my impatience and short replies— I sometimes detect in your face a puzzled pity for me your son— I have never been close to you —mostly your own fault; in that I am like you. It is as though you looked down from above at me—not with what they would describe as pride but the same that is in me: a sort of shame that the world should see you as I see you, a somewhat infantile creature— without subtlety— defenseless. And because you are defenseless I too, horribly, take advantage of you, (as you of me) my mother, keep you imprisoned—in the name of protection when you want so wildly to escape as I wish also to escape and leap into chaos (where Time has not yet begun) When Adam died it came out clearly— Not what commonly might have been supposed but a demon, fighting for the fire it needed to breathe to live again. A last chance. You kicked blindly before you and nearly broke your leg against the metal—then sank exhausted. And that is the horror of my guilt—and the sweetness even at this late date in some kind of acknowledgement I realize why you wish to communicate with the dead— And it is again I who try to hush you that you shall not make a fool of yourself and have them stare at you with natural faces— Trembling, sobbing and grabbing at the futile hands till a mind goes sour watching you—and flies off sick at the mumbling from which nothing clearly is ever spoken— It not so much frightens as shames me. I want to protect you, to spare you the disgrace— seeing you reach out that way to self-inflicted emptiness— As if you were not able to protect yourself— and me too—if we did not have to be so guarded— Therefore I make this last plea: Forgive me I have been a fool— (and remain a fool) If you are not already too blind too deaf, too lost in the past to know or to care— I will write a book about you— making you live (in a book!) as you still desperately want to live— to live always—unforgiving I’ll give you brandy or wine whenever I think you need it (need it) because it whips up your mind and your senses and brings color to your face —to enkindle that life too coarse for the usual, that sly obscenity that fertile darkness in which passion mates— reflecting the lightnings of creation— and the moon— “_C’est la vieillesse_ _inexorable qu’arrive!_” One would think you would be reconciled with Time instead of clawing at Him that way, terrified in the night—screaming out unwilling, unappeased and without shame— Might He not take that wasted carcass, crippled and deformed, that ruined face sightless, deafened— the color gone—that seems always listening, watching, waiting ashamed only of that single and last degradation— No. Never. Defenseless still you would keep every accoutrement which He has loaned till it shall be torn from your grasp, a final grip from those fingers which cannot hold a knife to cut the meat but which in a hypnotic ecstasy can so wrench a hand held out to you that our bones crack under the unwonted pressure— =_St. Francis Einstein of the Daffodils_= _On the first visit of Professor Einstein to the United States in the spring of 1921._ “Sweet land” at last! out of the sea— the Venusremembering wavelets rippling with laughter— freedom for the daffodils! —in a tearing wind that shakes the tufted orchards— Einstein, tall as a violet in the lattice-arbor corner is tall as a blossomy peartree A Samos, Samos dead and buried. Lesbia a black cat in the freshturned garden. All dead. All flesh they sung is rotten Sing of it no longer— Side by side young and old take the sun together— maples, green and red yellowbells and the vermilion quinceflower together— The peartree with fœtid blossoms sways its high topbranches with contrary motions and there are both pinkflowered and coralflowered peachtrees in the bare chickenyard of the old negro with white hair who hides poisoned fish-heads here and there where stray cats find them— find them Spring days swift and mutable winds blowing four ways hot and cold shaking the flowers— Now the northeast wind moving in fogs leaves the grass cold and dripping. The night is dark. But in the night the southeast wind approaches. The owner of the orchard lies in bed with open windows and throws off his covers one by one =_The Death of See_= One morning the wind scouring the streets I read: Poet and woman found shot dead Pact seen in murder— Suicide in artist’s suite— Their bodies fully clothed were found half covered by a blanket— See was described as a poet but when or where his poems were published M. could not say. . . . Which adds a certain gravity— Suddenly snow trees flashing upon the mind from a clean world =_To an Elder Poet_= To be able and not to do it Still as a flower No flame, a flower spent with heat— lovely flower hanging in the rain Never! Soberly Whiter than day Wait forever shaken by the rain forever =_Perpetuum Mobile: The City_= —a dream we dreamed each separately we two of love and of desire— that fused in the night— in the distance over the meadows by day impossible— The city disappeared when we arrived— A dream a little false toward which now we stand and stare transfixed— All at once in the east rising! All white! small as a flower— a locust cluster a shad bush blossoming Over the swamps a wild magnolia bud— greenish white a northern flower— And so we live looking— At night it wakes On the black sky— a dream toward which we love— at night more than a little false— We have bred we have dug we have figured up our costs we have bought an old rug— We batter at our unsatisfactory brilliance— There is no end to desire— Let us break through and go there— in vain! —delectable amusement: Milling about— Money! in armored trucks— Two men walking at two paces from each other their right hands at the hip— on the butt of an automatic— till they themselves hold up the bank and themselves drive off for themselves the money in an armored car— For love! Carefully carefully tying carefully selected wisps of long dark hair wisp by wisp upon the stubs of his kinky wool— For two hours they worked— until he coiled the thick knot upon that whorish head— Dragged insensible upon his face by the lines— —a running horse For love. Their eyes blown out— —for love, for love! Neither the rain Nor the storm— can keep them for love! from the daily accomplishment of their appointed rounds— Guzzling the creamy foods while out of sight in the sub-cellar— the waste fat the old vegetable chucked down a chute the foulest sink in the world— And go on the out-tide ten thousands cots floating to sea like weed that held back the pristine ships— And fattened there an eel in the water pipe— No end— There! There! There! —a dream of lights hiding the iron reason and stone a settled cloud— City whose stars of matchless splendor— and in bright-edged clouds the moon— bring silence breathlessly— Tearful city on a summer’s day the hard grey dwindling in a wall of rain— farewell! =_Cancion_= (_Lupercio De Argensola_) _Alivia sus fatigas_ _El labrador cansado_ _Quando su yerta barba escarcha cubre,_ _Pensando en las espigas_ _Del Agosto abrasado,_ _Y en los lagares ricos del Octubre._ The tired workman Takes his ease When his stiff beard’s all frosted over Thinking of blazing August’s corn And the brimming wine-cribs of October. =_Morning_= . =_The Crimson Cyclamen_= =_Morning_= on the hill is cool! Even the dead grass stems that start with the wind along the crude board fence are less than harsh. —a broken fringe of wooden and brick fronts above the city, fading out, beyond the watertank on stilts, an isolated house or two here and there, into the bare fields. The sky is immensely wide! No one about. The houses badly numbered. Sun benches at the curb bespeak another season, truncated poplars that having served for shade served also later for the fire. Rough cobbles and abandoned car rails interrupted by precipitous cross streets. Down-hill in the small, separate gardens (Keep out you) bare fruit trees and among tangled cords of unpruned grapevines low houses showered by unobstructed light. Pulley lines to poles, on one a blue and white tablecloth bellying easily. Feather beds from windows and swathed in old linoleum and burlap, fig trees. Barrels over shrubs. Level of the hill, two old men walking and talking come on together. —Firewood, all lengths and qualities stacked behind patched out-houses. Uses for ashes. And a church spire sketched on the sky, of sheet-metal and open beams, to resemble a church spire— —These Wops are wise —and walk about absorbed among stray dogs and sparrows, pigeons wheeling overhead, their feces falling— or shawled and jug in hand beside a concrete wall down which, from a loose water-pipe, a stain descends, the wall descending also, holding up a garden—On its side the pattern of the boards that made the forms is still discernible.—to the oil-streaked highway— Whence, turn and look where, at the crest, the shoulders of a man are disappearing gradually below the worn fox-fur of tattered grasses— And round again, the two old men in caps crossing at a gutter now, _Pago_, _Pago_! still absorbed. —a young man’s face staring from a dirty window—Women’s Hats—and at the door a cat, with one fore-foot on the top step, looks back— Scatubitch! Sacks of flour piled inside the bakery window, their paley trade-marks flattened to the glass— And with a stick, scratching within the littered field— old plaster, bits of brick—to find what coming? In God’s name! Washed out, worn out, scavengered and rescavengered— Spirit of place rise from these ashes repeating secretly an obscure refrain: This is my house and here I live. Here I was born and this is my office— —passionately leans examining, stirring with the stick, a child following. Roots, salads? Medicinal, stomachic? Of what sort? Abortifacient? To be dug, split, submitted to the sun, brewed cooled in a teacup and applied? Kid Hot Jock, in red paint, smeared along the fence.—and still remains, of— if and if, as the sun rises, rolls and comes again. But every day, every day she goes and kneels— died of tuberculosis when he came back from the war, nobody else in our family ever had it except a baby once after that— alone on the cold floor beside the candled altar, stifled weeping—and moans for his lost departed soul the tears falling and wiped away, turbid with her grime. Covered, swaddled, pinched and saved shrivelled, broken—to be rewetted and used again. =_The Crimson Cyclamen_= (_To the Memory of Charles Demuth_) White suffused with red more rose than crimson —all acolor the petals flare back from the stooping craters of those flowers as from a wind rising— And though the light that enfolds and pierces them discovers blues and yellows there also— and crimson’s a dull word beside such play— yet the effect against this winter where they stand—is crimson— It is miraculous that flower should rise by flower alike in loveliness— as thought mirrors of some perfection could never be too often shown— silence holds them— in that space. And color has been construed from emptiness to waken there— But the form came gradually. The plant was there before the flowers as always—the leaves, day by day changing. In September when the first pink pointed bud still bowed below, all the leaves heart-shaped were already spread— quirked and green and stenciled with a paler green irregularly across and round the edge— Upon each leaf it is a pattern more of logic than a purpose links each part to the rest, an abstraction playfully following centripetal devices, as of pure thought— the edge tying by convergent, crazy rays with the center— where that dips cupping down to the upright stem—the source that has splayed out fanwise and returns upon itself in the design thus decoratively— Such are the leaves freakish, of the air as thought is, of roots dark, complex from subterranean revolutions and rank odors waiting for the moon— The young leaves coming among the rest are more crisp and deeply cupped the edges rising first impatient of the slower stem—the older level, the oldest with the edge already fallen a little backward— the stem alone holding the form stiffly a while longer— Under the leaf, the same though the smooth green is gone. Now the ribbed design—if not the purpose, is explained. The stem’s pink flanges, strongly marked, stand to the frail edge, dividing, thinning through the pink and downy mesh—as the round stem is pink also—cranking to penciled lines angularly deft through all, to link together the unnicked argument to the last crinkled edge— where the under and the over meet and disappear and the air alone begins to go from them— the conclusion left still blunt, floating if warped and quaintly flecked whitened and streaked resting upon the tie of the stem— But half hidden under them such as they are it begins that must put thought to rest— wakes in tinted beaks still raising the head and passion is loosed— its small lusts addressed still to the knees and to sleep— abandoning argument lifts through the leaves day by day and one day opens! The petals! the petals undone loosen all five and swing up The flower flows to release— Fast within a ring where the compact agencies of conception lie mathematically ranged round the hair-like sting— From such a pit the color flows over a purple rim upward to the light! the light! all around— Five petals as one to flare, inverted a full flower each petal tortured eccentrically the while, warped edge jostling half-turned edge side by side until compact, tense evenly stained to the last fine edge an ecstasy from the empurpled ring climbs up (though firm there still) each petal by excess of tensions in its own flesh all rose— rose red standing until it bends backward upon the rest, above, answering ecstasy with excess all together acrobatically not as if bound (though still bound) but upright as if they hung from above to the streams with which they are veined and glow— the frail fruit by its frailty supreme opening in the tense moment to no bean no completion no root no leaf and no stem but color only and a form— It is passion earlier and later than thought that rises above thought at instant peril—peril itself a flower that lifts and draws it on— Frailer than level thought more convolute rose red highest the soonest to wither blacken and fall upon itself formless— And the flowers grow older and begin to change, larger now less tense, when at the full relaxing, widening the petals falling down the color paling through violaceous to tinted white— The structure of the petal that was all red beginning now to show from a deep central vein other finely scratched veins dwindling to that edge through which the light more and more shows fading through gradations immeasurable to the eye— The day rises and swifter briefer more frailly relaxed than thought that still holds good—the color draws back while still the flower grows the rose of it nearly all lost a darkness of dawning purple paints a deeper afternoon— The day passes in a horizon of colors all meeting less severe in loveliness the petals fallen now well back till flower touches flower all round at the petal tips merging into one flower— =_Recent Verse 1938_= =_Classic Scene_= A power-house in the shape of a red brick chair 90 feet high on the seat of which sit the figures of two metal stacks—aluminum— commanding an area of squalid shacks side by side— from one of which buff smoke streams while under a grey sky the other remains passive today— =_Autumn_= A stand of people by an open grave underneath the heavy leaves celebrates the cut and fill for the new road where an old man on his knees reaps a basket- ful of matted grasses for his goats =_The Term_= A rumpled sheet of brown paper about the length and apparent bulk of a man was rolling with the wind slowly over and over in the street as a car drove down upon it and crushed it to the ground. Unlike a man it rose again rolling with the wind over and over to be as it was before. =_Weasel Snout_= Staring she kindles the street windows to daintiness— Under her driving looks gems plainly colored blue and red and green grow fabulous again—She is the modern marvel the ray from whose bulbous eyes starts through glass walls to animate dead things— =_Advent of Today_= South wind striking in—torn spume—trees inverted over trees scudding low a sea become winged bringing today out of yesterday in bursts of rain— a darkened presence above detail of October grasses veiled at once in a downpour— conflicting rattle of the rain against the storm’s slow majesty— leaves rising instead of falling the sun coming and going toward the middle parts of the sky =_The Sun_= lifts heavily and cloud and sea weigh upon the unwaiting air— Hasteless the silence is divided by small waves that wash away night whose wave is without sound and gone— Old categories slacken memoryless— weed and shells where in the night a high tide left its mark and block of half burned wood washed clean— The slovenly bearded rocks hiss— Obscene refuse charms this modern shore— Listen! it is a sea-snail singing— Relax, relent— the sun has climbed the sand is drying—Lie by the broken boat— the eel-grass bends and is released again—Go down, go down past knowledge shelly lace— among the rot of children screaming their delight— logged in the penetrable nothingness whose heavy body opens to their leaps without a wound— =_A Bastard Peace_= —where a heavy woven-wire fence topped with jagged ends, encloses a long cinder-field by the river— A concrete disposal tank at one end, small wooden pit-covers scattered about—above sewer intakes, most probably— Down the center’s a service path graced on one side by a dandelion in bloom—and a white butterfly— The sun parches still the parched grass. Along the fence, blocked from the water leans the washed-out street— Three cracked houses— a willow, two chickens, a small boy, with a home-made push cart, walking by, waving a whip— Gid ap! No other traffic or like to be. There to rest, to improvise and unbend! Through the fence beyond the field and shining water, 12 o’clock blows but nobody goes other than the kids from school— =_The Poor_= It’s the anarchy of poverty delights me, the old yellow wooden house indented among the new brick tenements Or a cast-iron balcony with panels showing oak branches in full leaf. It fits the dress of the children reflecting every stage and custom of necessity— Chimneys, roofs, fences of wood and metal in an unfenced age and enclosing next to nothing at all: the old man in a sweater and soft black hat who sweeps the sidewalk— his own ten feet of it in a wind that fitfully turning his corner has overwhelmed the entire city =_To a Dead Journalist_= Behind that white brow now the mind simply sleeps— the eyes, closed, the lips, the mouth, the chin, no longer useful, the prow of the nose. But rumors of the news, unrealizable, cling still among those silent, butted features, a sort of wonder at this scoop come now, too late: beneath the lucid ripples to have found so monstrous an obscurity. =_Africa_= Quit writing and in Morocco raise a beard Go without a hat like poor Clew who braved the desert heat. Or if you will like Herb sit on a hotel balcony and watch your ship while the girls bring wines and food to you privately. The language? Make money. Organize The language. Right. =_Lovely Ad_= All her charms are bubbles from a tilted cigarette— And look! she sees to light them his face! Whereas for us his sleek black hair is hint enough. =_4th of July_= I The ship moves but its smoke moves with the wind faster than the ship —thick coils of it through leafy trees pressing upon the river II The heat makes this place of the woods a room in which two robins pain crying distractedly over the plight of their unhappy young III During the explosions at dawn, the celebrations I could hear a native cuckoo in the distance as at dusk, before I’d heard a night hawk calling =_The Defective Record_= Cut the bank for the fill. Dump sand pumped out of the river into the old swale killing whatever was there before—including even the muskrats. Who did it? There’s the guy. Him in the blue shirt and turquoise skullcap. Level it down for him to build a house on to build a house on to build a house on to build a house on to build a house on to . . . =_Middle_= of this profusion a robin flies carrying food on its tongue and a flag red white and blue hangs motionless. Return from the sick wean the mind again from among the foliage also of infection. There is a brass band at the monument and the children that paraded the blistering streets are giving lustily to the memory of our war dead. =_A Fond Farewell_= You? Why you’re just sucking my life blood out. What do I care if the baker and the garbage man must be served. Take what you might give and be damned to you. I’m going elsewhere. =_The Unknown_= Do you exist my pretty bird flying above the snow? Are you actually flying or do I imagine it so? Detail of wing and breast unquestionably there— Or do I merely think you perfect in mid-air? _CODA_ Beating heart feather of wing and breast to this bleakness antithetical In love dear love, my love detail is all =_Porous_= Cattail fluff blows in at the bank door, and on wings of chance the money floats out, lighter than a dream, through the heavy walls and vanishes. =_The Petunia_= Purple! for months unknown but for the barren sky. A purple trumpet fragile as our hopes from the very sand saluting us. =_The Graceful Bastion_= A white butterfly in an August garden, light as it may seem among the zinnias and verbenas, fragile among the red trumpeted petunias, is ribbed with steel wired to the sun whose triumphant power will keep it safe, free as laughter, secure against bombardments no more dangerous to its armored might than if the cotton clouds should merely fall. =_The Return to Work_= Promenading their skirted galleons of sex, the two office assistants rock unevenly together down the broad stairs, one (as I follow slowly in the trade wind of my admiration) gently slapping her thighs. =_The Deceptrices_= Because they are not, they paint their lips and dress like whores. Because they are uncertain, they put on the bold looks of experience. This is their youth, too soon gone, too soon the unalterable conclusion. =_Detail_= Her milk don’t seem to . . She’s always hungry but . . She seems to _gain_ all right, I don’t know. =_Detail_= Doc, I bin lookin’ for you I owe you two bucks. How you doin’? Fine. When I get it I’ll bring it up to you. =_Detail_= Hey! Can I have some more milk? YEEEEAAAAASSSSS! —always the gentle mother! =_Detail_= I had a misfortune in September, just at the end of my vacation. I been keepin’ away from that for years. Just an accident. No foundation. None at all, no feeling. I’m too old to have a child. Why I’m fifty! =_Their Most Prized Possession—_= their liberty— Hands behind a coat shiny green. Tall, the eyes downcast— Sunlight through a clutter of wet clouds, lush weeds— The oriole! Hungry as an oriole. =_Unnamed_= _From “Paterson”_ 1 Your lovely hands Your lovely tender hands! Reflections of what grace what heavenly joy predicted for the world in knowing you— blest, as am I, and humbled by such ecstasy. 2 When I saw the flowers I was thunderstruck! You should not have been— Tulips, she said and smiled. 3 I bought a new bathing suit Just pants and a brassiere— I haven’t shown it to my mother yet. 4 Better than flowers is a view of yourself my darling— I’m so glad you came I thought I should never see you again. =_At the Bar_= Hi, open up a dozen. Wha’cha tryin’ ta do— charge ya batteries? Make it two. Easy girl! You’ll blow a fuse if ya keep that up. =_Graph for Action_= Don’t say “humbly”. “Respectfully”, yes but not “humbly”. And the Committee both farted and that settled it. =_Breakfast_= Twenty sparrows on a scattered turd: Share and share alike. =_To Greet a Letter-Carrier_= Why’n’t you bring me a good letter? One with lots of money in it. I could make use of that. Atta boy! Atta boy! =_These_= are the desolate, dark weeks when nature in its barrenness equals the stupidity of man. The year plunges into night and the heart plunges lower than night to an empty, windswept place without sun, stars or moon but a peculiar light as of thought that spins a dark fire— whirling upon itself until, in the cold, it kindles to make a man aware of nothing that he knows, not loneliness itself—Not a ghost but would be embraced—emptiness, despair—(They whine and whistle) among the flashes and booms of war; houses of whose rooms the cold is greater than can be thought, the people gone that we loved, the beds lying empty, the couches damp, the chairs unused— Hide it away somewhere out of the mind, let it get roots and grow, unrelated to jealous ears and eyes—for itself. In this mine they come to dig—all. Is this the counterfoil to sweetest music? The source of poetry that seeing the clock stopped, says, The clock has stopped that ticked yesterday so well? and hears the sound of lakewater splashing—that is now stone. =_The Drunkard_= =_The Drunkard_= =(This poem, recently recovered, was sent by me to my mother in the fall of 1923 accompanied by a letter in part as follows:= _Dearest Mother: Here is a poem to set beside some of my “incomprehensible” latter work. I think you will like this one. It seems the sort of thing that I am going to do. Art is a curious command. We must do what we are bidden to do and can go only so far as the light permits. I am always earnest as you, if anyone, must know. But no doubt I puzzle you—as I do myself. Plenty of love from your son. W.)_ You drunken tottering bum by Christ in spite of all your filth and sordidness I envy you It is the very face of love itself abandoned in that powerless committal to despair =_Paterson: Episode 17_= Beat hell out of it Beautiful Thing spotless cap and crossed white straps over the dark rippled cloth— Lift the stick above that easy head where you sit by the ivied church, one arm buttressing you long fingers spread out among the clear grass prongs— and drive it down Beautiful Thing that your caressing body kiss and kiss again that holy lawn— And again: obliquely— legs curled under you as a deer’s leaping— pose of supreme indifference sacrament to a summer’s day Beautiful Thing in the unearned suburbs then pause the arm fallen— what memories of what forgotten face brooding upon that lily stem? The incredible nose straight from the brow the empurpled lips and dazzled half-sleepy eyes Beautiful Thing of some trusting animal makes a temple of its place of savage slaughter revealing the damaged will incites still to violence consummately beautiful thing and falls about your resting shoulders— Gently! Gently! as in all things an opposite that awakes the fury, conceiving knowledge by way of despair that has no place to lay its glossy head— Save only—Not alone! Never, if possible alone! to escape the accepted chopping block and a square hat!— And as reverie gains and your joints loosen the trick’s done! Day is covered and we see you— but not alone! drunk and bedraggled to release the strictness of beauty under a sky full of stars Beautiful Thing and a slow moon— The car had stopped long since when the others came and dragged those out who had you there indifferent to whatever the anesthetic Beautiful Thing might slum away the bars— Reek of it! What does it matter? could set free only the one thing— But you! —in your white lace dress “the dying swan” and high heeled slippers—tall as you already were— till your head through fruitful exaggeration was reaching the sky and the prickles of its ecstasy Beautiful Thing! And the guys from Paterson beat up the guys from Newark and told them to stay the hell out of their territory and then socked you one across the nose Beautiful Thing for good luck and emphasis cracking it till I must believe that all desired women have had each in the end a busted nose and live afterward marked up Beautiful Thing for memory’s sake to be credible in their deeds Then back to the party! and they maled and femaled you jealously Beautiful Thing as if to discover when and by what miracle there should escape what? still to be possessed out of what part Beautiful Thing should it look? or be extinguished— Three days in the same dress up and down— It would take a Dominie to be patient Beautiful Thing with you— The stroke begins again— regularly automatic contrapuntal to the flogging like the beat of famous lines in the few excellent poems woven to make you gracious and on frequent occasions foul drunk Beautiful Thing pulse of release to the attentive and obedient mind. =_The Last Words of My English Grandmother_= _1920_ There were some dirty plates and a glass of milk beside her on a small table near the rank, disheveled bed— Wrinkled and nearly blind she lay and snored rousing with anger in her tones to cry for food, Gimme something to eat— They’re starving me— I’m all right I won’t go to the hospital. No, no, no Give me something to eat Let me take you to the hospital, I said and after you are well you can do as you please. She smiled, Yes you do what you please first then I can do what I please— Oh, oh, oh! she cried as the ambulance men lifted her to the stretcher— Is this what you call making me comfortable? By now her mind was clear— Oh you think you’re smart you young people, she said, but I’ll tell you you don’t know anything. Then we started. On the way we passed a long row of elms. She looked at them awhile out of the ambulance window and said, What are all those fuzzy-looking things out there? Trees? Well, I’m tired of them and rolled her head away. =_The Waitress_= No wit (and none needed) but the silence of her ways, grey eyes in a depth of black lashes— The eyes look and the look falls. There is no way, no way. So close one may feel the warmth of the cheek and yet there is no way. The benefits of poverty are a roughened skin of the hands, the broken knuckles, the stained wrists. Serious. Not as the others. All the rest are liars, all but you. Wait on us. Wait on us, the hair held back practically by a net, close behind the ears, at the sides of the head. But the eyes— but the mouth, lightly (quickly) touched with rouge. The black dress makes the hair dark, strangely enough, and the white dress makes it light. There is a mole under the jaw, low under the right ear— And what arms! The glassruby ring on the fourth finger of the left hand. —and the movements under the scant dress as the weight of the tray makes the hips shift forward slightly in lifting and beginning to walk— The Nominating Committee presents the following resolutions, etc. etc. etc. All those in favor signify by saying, Aye. Contrariminded, No. Carried. And aye, and aye, and aye! And the way the bell-hop runs downstairs: ta tuck a ta tuck a ta tuck a ta tuck a ta tuck a and the gulls in the open window screaming over the slow break of the cold waves— O unlit candle with the soft white plume, Sunbeam Finest Safety Matches all together in a little box— And the reflections of both in the mirror and the reflection of the hand, writing writing— Speak to me of her! —and nobody else and nothing else in the whole city, not an electric sign of shifting colors, fourfoot daisies and acanthus fronds going from red to orange, green to blue—forty feet across— Wait on us, wait on us with your momentary beauty to be enjoyed by none of us. Neither by you, certainly, nor by me. =_A Marriage Ritual_= Above the darkness of a river upon winter’s icy sky dreams the silhouette of the city: This is my own! a flower, a fruit, an animal by itself— It does not recognize me and never will. Still, it is my own and my heart goes out to it dumbly— but eloquently in my own breast for you whom I love —and cannot express what my love is, how it varies, though I waste it— It is a river flowing through refuse the dried sticks of weeds and falling shell-ice lilac from above as if with thoughts of you— This is my face and its moods my moods, a riffled whiteness shaken by the flow that’s constant in its swiftness as a pool— A Polack in the stinging wind, her arms wrapped to her breast comes shambling near. To look at what? downstream. It is an old-world flavor: the poor the unthrifty, passionately biased by what errors of conviction— Now a boy is rolling a stout metal drum up from below the river bank. The woman and the boy, two thievish figures, struggle with the object. . . . in this light! And still there is one leafless tree just at the water’s edge and— my face constant to you! =_The Swaggering Gait_= Bareheaded the hair blond in tight curls the heavy and worn blue sweater buttoned tight under a cold sky he walks and lifts the butt of cigar he holds to his pursing lips alone— save for the tilt of his shoulders the swing of his knees— Even the paper lunch bag in his other hand sharing that one distinction =_The Predicter of Famine_= White day, black river corrugated and swift— as the stone of the sky on the prongy ring of the tarnished city is smooth and without motion: A gull flies low upstream, his beak tilted sharply, his eye alert to the providing water. =_Illegitimate Things_= Water still flows— The thrush still sings though in the skirts of the sky at the bottom of the distance huddle . . . . echoing cannon! Whose silence revives valley after valley to peace as poems still conserve the language of old ecstasies. =_The Province_= The figure of tall white grass by the cinder-bank keeps its alignment faultlessly. Moves! in the brilliant channels of the wind Shines! its polished shafts and feathered fronds ensconced there colorless beyond all feeling This is the principle of the godly, fluted, a statue tall and pale —lifeless save only in beauty, the kernel of all seeking, the eternal =_The Brilliance_= Oh sock, sock, sock! brief but persistent. Emulate the gnat or a tree’s leaves that are not the tree but mass to shape it. Finis! Finish and get out of this. =_Fragment_= My God, Bill, what have you done? What do you think I’ve done? I’ve opened up the world. Where did you get them? Marvellous beautiful! Where does all snot come from? Under the nose, Yea-uh? —the gutter, where everything comes from, the manure heap. =_The Yellow Season_= The black, long-tailed, one then, unexpectedly, another glide easily on a curtain of yellow leaves, upward— The season wakens! loveliness chirping and barking stands among the branches, its narrow-clawed toes and furry hands moving in the leaves— Round white eyes dotted with jet live still, alert—in all gentleness! unabated beyond the cackle of death’s stinking certainty. =_Mistrust of the Beloved_= At the height of love a darkness intervenes: I hated you the whole first year. It will reawaken. Be patient. (Ah but what of the need to be patient?) It will reawaken by somersaults and see-saws, your hatred will reawaken. =_Passer Domesticus_= Shabby little bird I suppose it’s the story every- where, if you’re domestic you’re drab. Peep peep! the nightingale ’s your cousin but these flagrant amours get you no- where. Dull to the eye you have crept in unmolested. =_The United States_= The government of your body, sweet, shall be my model for the world. There is no desire in me to rule that world or to advise it. Look how it rouses with the sun, shuts with night and sleeps fringed by the slowly turning stars. I boil I freeze before its tropics and its cold. Its shocks are mine and to the peaceful legislature of its seas, by you its president, I yield my willing services. =_The Sun Bathers_= A tramp thawing out on a doorstep against an east wall Nov. 1, 1933: a young man begrimed and in an old army coat wriggling and scratching while a fat negress in a yellow-house window nearby leans out and yawns into the fine weather =_Sparrow Among Dry Leaves_= The sparrows by the iron fence-post hardly seen for the dry leaves that half cover them— stirring up the leaves—fight and chirp stridently search and peck the sharp gravel to good digestion and love’s obscure and insatiable appetite =_The Men_= Wherein is Moscow’s dignity more than Passaic’s dignity? A few men have added color better to the canvas, that’s all. The river is the same the bridges are the same there is the same to be discovered of the sun— Look how cold, steelgrey run the waters of the Passaic. The Church-of-the-Polaks’ bulbous towers kiss the sky just so sternly so dreamily as in Warsaw, as in Moscow— Violet smoke rises from the mill chimneys—Only the men are different who see it draw it down in their minds or might be different =_Song_= The black-winged gull of love is flying— hurl of the waters’ futile might! Tirelessly his deft strokes plying he skims free in the licking waves’ despite— There is no lying to his shrill mockery of their torment day or night. =_Descent_= From disorder (a chaos) order grows —grows fruitful. The chaos feeds it. Chaos feeds the tree. =_You Have Pissed Your Life_= Any way you walk Any way you turn Any way you stand Any way you lie You have pissed your life From an ineffectual fool butting his head blindly against obstacles, become brilliant—focusing, performing accurately to a given end— Any way you walk Any way you turn Any way you stand Any way you lie You have pissed your life =_Moon and Stars_= January! The beginning! A moon scoured by the wind calls from its cavern. A vacant eye stares. The wind howls. Among bones in rose flesh singing wake the stormy stars. =_The Girl_= The wall, as I watched, came neck-high to her walking difficultly seaward of it over sand and stones. She made the effort, mounted it while I had my head turned, I merely saw her on top at the finish rolling over. She stood up dusted off her skirt then there lifted her feet unencumbered to skip dancing away =_Simplex Sigilum Veri_= an american papermatch packet closed, gilt with a panel insert, the bank, a narrow building black, in a blue sky, puffs of white cloud, the small windows in perspective, bright green grass— a sixinch metal tray, polished bronze, holding a blue pencil hexagonal, its bright brassy butt catching the window light, the dullred eraser half worn down and a cheap brownenameled pen-holder rest on the brown marbled field of the stained blotter by an oystershell smudged with cigarette ash, a primrose plant in a gold-ringed saucer, flowerless— surfaces of all sorts bearing printed characters, bottles words printed on the backs of two telephone directories, titles for poems, The Advertising Biographical Calendar of Medicine, Wednesday 18 Thursday 19, Friday 20, papers of various shades sticking out from under others, throwing the printing out of line: portrait of all that which we have lost, a truncated pyramid, bronzed metal (probably the surface only) to match the tray, to which a square, hinged lid is fixed, the inkstand, from whose imagined top the Prince of Wales having climbed up, once with all his might drove a golf ball. =_The Phoenix and the Tortoise_= The link between Barnum and Calas is the freak against which Rexroth rages, the six-legged cow, the legless woman for each presents a social concept seeking approval, a pioneer society and a modern asserting the norm by stress of the Minotaur. It’s a legitimate manoeuvre, perhaps it is all art and Barnum our one genius (in the arts) on the moral plane: the freak and the athlete: the circus, by which we return from Agamemnon sober to our tasks—of pleasure— and to our minds. If so, in spite of Rexroth, Barnum our Aeschylus, we should show ourselves more courteous to Calas the Greek who has come from Oxford via Paris to enlighten us, affect less flippancy toward his _Confound the Wise_: “If, in a study such as this, in which the ideas of the writer are discussed, we stop short at questions concerning form, it is because forms—and I hope this appears clearly in everything I have so far said—are for us tightly bound up with ideas and feelings. On this point I am a monist and opposed to the positivistic and dualistic habits that the last century has bequeathed us. Any error concerning form is consequently a fundamental error, and when ideas are erroneous and when feelings are untrue, then conformity bursts out and appears in form.” Read of Miranda the Portuguese torso—connoting Rexroth’s Tortoise, say what he will: read one then the other, moral concepts both, curiously linked, by which in time we may behold, “the sun set where it did arise and moons grow into virgins’ eyes, post sprout leaves and turn a tree and morbid fruit normality,” as in the fluctuating molecule; details of The Greatest Show on Earth—if the mind survive and I be an American. =_Index of Poems by Titles_= =_Index of Poems by Titles_= A Bastard Peace, 414 A Celebration, 188 A Chinese Toy, 370 A Coronal, 38 A Fond Farewell, 422 A Good Night, 192 A Marriage Ritual, 447 A Poem for Norman MacLeod, 114 A Portrait in Greys, 160 A Portrait of the Times, 92 A Prelude, 141 Adam, 371 Ad Infinitum, 28 Advent of Today, 411 Africa, 417 All the Fancy Things, 321 An After Song, 22 An Early Martyr, 85 An Elegy for D. H. Lawrence, 361 Apology, 131 Appeal, 24 Approach of Winter, 197 April, 190 Arrival, 215 At Night, 191 At the Ball Game, 284 At the Bar, 431 At the Faucet of June, 251 Autumn, 408 Ballet, 169 Berket and the Stars, 191 Between Walls, 343 Birds and Flowers, 355 Blizzard, 198 Blueflags, 225 Breakfast, 432 Brilliant Sad Sun, 324 Cancion, 390 Canthara, 143 Chicory and Daisies, 122 Classic Scene, 407 Complaint, 199 Complete Destruction, 207 Composition, 260 Con Brio, 31 Conquest, 172 Contemporania, 29 Crude Lament, 22 Daisy, 208 Danse Russe, 148 Dawn, 138 Death, 78 Death the Barber, 264 Dedication for a Plot of Ground, 171 Delia Primavera Trasportata Al Morale, 57 Descent, 460 Detail, 427 Detail, 428 Drink, 140 El Hombre, 140 Epitaph, 212 Eve, 375 Fine Work with Pitch and Copper, 368 Fire Spirit, 24 First Praise, 17 First Version: 1915, 173 Fish, 177 Flight to the City, 244 Flowers by the Sea, 87 4th of July, 419 Fragment, 453 From “The Birth of Venus,” Song, 20 Full Moon, 65 Good Night, 145 Graph for Action, 431 Great Mullen, 211 Gulls, 126 Hemmed-in Males, 322 Hero, 139 Hic Jacet, 30 History, 49 Homage, 18 Horned Purple, 273 Hymn to Love Ended, 108 Illegitimate Things, 451 Immortal, 21 Impromptu: The Suckers, 315 In Harbor, 128 In the ’Sconset Bus, 338 Interests of 1926, 352 Invocation and Conclusion, 105 Item, 95 It Is a Living Coral, 325 January, 197 January Morning, 162 K. McB., 157 Keller Gegen Dom, 147 La Belle Dame de Tous les Jours, 370 Late for Summer Weather, 100 Le Médecin Malgré Lui, 36 Libertad! Igualidad! Fraternidad!, 134 Light Becomes Darkness, 266 Lighthearted William, 226 Lines, 206 Lines on Receiving the Dial’s Award: 1927, 350 Love Song, 125 Love Song, 137 Love Song, 174 Lovely Ad, 418 Man in a Room, 37 March, 43 M. B., 144 Memory of April, 207 Metric Figure, 123 Mezzo Forte, 21 Middle, 421 Mistrust of the Beloved, 455 Moon and Stars, 462 Morning, 393 Mujer, 149 Nantucket, 348 New England, 335 On Gay Wallpaper, 345 Overture to a Dance of Locomotives, 194 Passer Domesticus, 456 Pastoral, 121 Pastoral, 124 Pastoral, 161 Paterson, 233 Paterson: Episode 17, 438 Peace on Earth, 15 Perpetuum Mobile: The City, 384 Play, 206 Poem, 340 Porous, 424 Portent, 27 Portrait of a Lady, 40 Portrait of a Woman in Bed, 150 Portrait of the Author, 228 Postlude, 16 Primrose, 209 Proletarian Portrait, 101 Promenade, 132 Queen-Ann’s-Lace, 210 Quietness, 277 Rain, 74 Rapid Transit, 282 Rigamarole, 278 Riposte, 156 Romance Moderne, 181 Sea-Trout and Butterfish, 91 Shoot it Jimmy!, 269 Sicilian Emigrant’s Song, 35 Simplex Sigilum Veri, 463 Sluggishly, 341 Smell!, 153 Song, 460 Sparrow Among Dry Leaves, 458 Spouts, 222 Spring, 205 Spring and All, 241 Spring Song, 119 Spring Storm, 202 Spring Strains, 159 St. Francis Einstein of the Daffodils, 379 Struggle of Wings, 291 Sub Terra, 117 Summer Song, 135 Sunday, 109 Sympathetic Portrait of a Child, 155 The Agonized Spires, 262 The Attic Which Is Desire, 353 The Avenue of Poplars, 280 The Birds, 218 The Bird’s Companion, 69 The Black Winds, 245 The Botticellian Trees, 80 The Brilliance, 453 The Bull, 336 The Catholic Bells, 111 The Cod Head, 333 The Cold Night, 203 The Crimson Cyclamen, 397 The Dark Day, 201 The Dead Baby, 113 The Death of Franco of Cologne: His Prophecy of Beethoven, 25 The Death of See, 381 The Deceptrices, 426 The Defective Record, 420 The Descent of Winter, 297 The Desolate Field, 196 The Disputants, 218 The Drunkard, 437 The Eyeglasses, 256 The Farmer, 243 The Flower, 236 The Flowers Alone, 90 The Fool’s Song, 19 The Gentle Man, 205 The Girl, 462 The Graceful Bastion, 425 The Great Figure, 230 The Hermaphroditic Telephones, 286 The House, 70 The Hunter, 214 The Jungle, 342 The Last Words of My English Grandmother, 443 The Late Singer, 187 The Lily, 344 The Locust Tree in Flower, 93 The Locust Tree in Flower, 94 The Lonely Street, 227 The Men, 459 The Nightingales, 224 The Ogre, 154 The Old Men, 158 The Ordeal, 23 The Petunia, 424 The Phoenix and the Tortoise, 465 The Poor, 206 The Poor, 415 The Pot of Flowers, 242 The Predicter of Famine, 450 The Province, 452 The Raper from Passenack, 103 The Red Lily, 351 The Red Wheelbarrow, 277 The Return to Work, 426 The Revelation, 39 The Right of Way, 258 The Rose, 249 The Rose, 369 The Sea, 275 The Sea-Elephant, 71 The Shadow, 120 The Soughing Wind, 205 The Source, 346 The Sun, 412 The Sun Bathers, 457 The Swaggering Gait, 449 The Term, 409 The Thinker, 220 The Tulip Bed, 221 The Trees, 66 The Unknown, 423 The United States, 457 The Waitress, 445 The Wanderer, 3 The Widow’s Lament in Springtime, 223 The Wildflower, 287 The Wind Increases, 68 The Winds, 349 The Yachts, 106 The Yellow Season, 454 The Young Housewife, 136 The Young Laundryman, 204 Their Most Prized Possession—, 428 These, 433 This Florida: 1924, 329 This Is Just to Say, 354 Thursday, 202 Time the Hangman, 204 To a Dead Journalist, 416 To a Friend, 205 To a Friend Concerning Several Ladies, 216 To a Mexican Pig-Bank, 98 To a Poor Old Woman, 99 To a Solitary Disciple, 167 To a Wood Thrush, 367 To an Elder Poet, 383 To an Old Jaundiced Woman, 268 To Be Closely Written On A Small Piece of Paper . . ., 203 To Elsie, 270 To Greet a Letter-Carrier, 432 To Have Done Nothing, 247 To Mark Anthony in Heaven, 33 To Waken An Old Lady, 200 To Wish Myself Courage, 32 Tract, 129 Transitional, 34 Tree and Sky, 102 Trees, 142 Unnamed, 429 View of a Lake, 96 Virtue, 152 Waiting, 213 Weasel Snout, 410 Wild Orchard, 88 Willow Poem, 196 Winter, 89 Winter Quiet, 141 Winter Sunset, 127 Winter Trees, 201 You Have Pissed Your Life, 461 Young Love, 253 Young Sycamore, 332 Young Woman at a Window, 369 Youth and Beauty, 219 THE END TRANSCRIBER NOTES Punctuation and layout has been maintained as in the printed version. [The end of _The Collected Earlier Poems of William Carlos Williams_ by William Carlos Williams]