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Intellectual Things

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INTELLECTUAL THINGS

BY

STANLEY J. KUNITZ

GARDEN CITY, N. Y.
DOUBLEDAY, DORAN
AND COMPANY, INC.
MCMXXX

COPYRIGHT, 1929, 1930
BY STANLEY J. KUNITZ
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES AT
THE COUNTRY LIFE PRESS
GARDEN CITY, N. Y.

FIRST EDITION

TO
HELEN PEARCE

“For the tear is an intellectual thing.”

WILLIAM BLAKE

Certain of these poems
have appeared in

THE DIAL
THE NEW AMERICAN CARAVAN
POETRY: A Magazine of Verse
THE NATION
THE NEW REPUBLIC
THE COMMONWEAL
HERALD-TRIBUNE BOOKS
HOUND AND HORN

CONTENTS

CHANGE

INTELLECTUAL THINGS

DISSOLVING in the chemic vat
Of time, man (gristle and fat),
Corrupting on a rock in space
That crumbles, lifts his impermanent face
To watch the stars, his brain locked tight
Against the tall revolving night.
Yet is he neither here nor there
Because the mind moves everywhere;
And he is neither now nor then
Because to-morrow comes again
Foreshadowed, and the ragged wing
Of yesterday’s remembering
Cuts sharply the immediate moon;
Nor is he always: late and soon
Becoming, never being, till
Becoming is a being still.
Here, Now, and Always, man would be
Inviolate eternally:
This is his spirit’s trinity.

GEOMETRY OF MOODS

CONCENTRICAL, the universe and I
Rotated on God’s crystal axletree,
So perfectly adjusted in suspense
I could not mark our split circumference,
But sphere in sphere, devotion in devotion,
Was a thing of folding air, a windy motion.
My spinal pole, tipped with a globe of light,
Stretched long as time into the infinite,
And when I turned to look upon the face
Of love’s incarnate form, tremendous space
Inclined upon her mouth, the natural nest
Where, throbbing like a bird, singed thought might rest.
Concentrical, the universe and I
Rotated on God’s crystal axletree,
I core of the world, a bead in a ball of glass
So pure that only Nothing could be less.
O the earth ensphered me, liberal and warm,
When the curve of heaven was her sleeping arm.
Now cubical upon a fractured pole
It creaks, scraping the circle of my soul.

FOR THE WORD IS FLESH

O RUINED father dead, long sweetly rotten
Under the dial, the time-dissolving urn,
Beware a second perishing, forgotten,
Heap fallen leaves of memory to burn
On the slippery rock, the black eroding heart,
Before the wedged frost splits it clean apart.
The nude hand drops no sacramental flower
Of blood among the tough upthrusting weeds.
Senior, in this commemorative hour,
What shall the quick commemorate, what deeds
Ephemeral, what dazzling words that flare
Like rockets from the mouth to burst in air?
Of hypochondriacs that gnawed their seasons
In search of proofs, Lessius found twenty-two
Fine arguments, Tolet gave sixty reasons
Why souls survive. And what are they to you?
And, father, what to me, who cannot blur
The crystal brain with fantasies of Er,
Remembering such factual spikes as pierce
The supplicating palms, and by the sea
Remembering the eyes I hear the fierce
Wild cry of Jesus on the holy tree,
Yet have of you no syllable to keep,
Only the deep rock crumbling in the deep.
Observe the wisdom of the Florentine
Who, feeling death upon him, scribbled fast
To make revision of a deathbed scene,
Gloating that he was accurate at last.
Let sons learn from their lipless fathers how
Man enters hell without a golden bough.

TWILIGHT

I WAIT. I deepen in the room.
Fed lions, glowing, congregate
In corners, sleep and fade. For whom
It may concern I, tawny, wait.
Time flowing through the window; day
Spilling on the board its bright
Last blood. Folding (big, gauzy, gray),
A moth sits on the western light.
Sits on my heart that, darkened, drips
No honey from its punctured core,
Yet feeds my hands and feeds my lips.
The Moon, the Moon, is at the door!

SINGLE VISION

BEFORE I am completely shriven
I shall reject my inch of heaven,
Cancel my eyes, and, standing, sink
Into my deepest self; there drink
Memory down. The banner of
My blood, unfurled, will not be love,
Only the pity and the pride
Of it, pinned to my open side.
When I have utterly refined
The composition of my mind,
Shaped language of my marrow till
Its forms are instant to my will,
Suffered the leaf of my heart to fall
Under the wind, and, stripping all
The tender blanket from my bone,
Rise like a skeleton in the sun,
I shall have risen to disown
The good mortality I won.
Directly risen with the stain
Of life upon my crested brain,
Which I shall shake against my ghost
To frighten him, when I am lost.
Gladly, as any poison, yield
My halved conscience, brightly peeled;
Infect him, since we live but once,
With the unused evil in my bones.
I’ll shed the tear of souls, the true
Sweat, Blake’s intellectual dew,
Before I am resigned to slip
A dusty finger on my lip.

PARTICULAR LULLABY

DECLINES at evening from your eyes,
Like summer slipping down a tree,
Your noon-high pride: but not your wise,
Your sensitive pleased beauty.
The ebb of spirit from the vase
Of woman is the hurt extreme
Of conscious breath. Bewilder your thighs,
Wrap your long thought in a dream.
By image of all hush, a mist
Of blossom on the feminine bough,
Annul the runner of your wrist,
The small clock going in your brow.
On present time’s derisive hope
Then break, O ever of your smile:
Sunbreak of lips, from radiant sleep,
Dazzle the perpetually meanwhile.

PROMISE ME

ONLY, when I am sudden loss
Of consequence for mind and stair,
Picking my dogged way from us
To whom, recessive in some where
Of recollection, with the cross
Fallen, the breast in disrepair:
Only, when loosening clothes, you lean
Out of your window sleepily,
And with luxurious, lidded mien
Sniff at the bitter dark—dear she,
Think somewhat gently of, between
Love ended and beginning, me.

STRANGE CALENDAR

CONSIDERED by the logical brief clock
That keeps no reckoning of blood’s unreason,
I cannot board your minute at the dock
Of this perpetual departure; I cannot wake
Beside your name, for having welcomed light in a later season.
Suppose my punctual hat should not arrive
To-night at that known corner where the eyes
Expect: if you should stand engraved with love
Until through annuals of space I came to wive
Your precarious dear doom—suppose, My Early One, suppose——
Or even should your bashful feet have fled,
Yet one of me, arrived, shall pace the square;
And one of me shall watch your not mine bed,
Breathing upon your sleep; another shall have laid
Himself in the revolving rock and, ageless, wait you there.

POEM

O HEART: this is a dream I had, or not a dream.
Lovingly, lovingly, I wept, but my tears did not rhyme.
In the year of my mother’s blood, when I was born,
She buried my innocent head in a field, because the earth
Was sleepy with the winter. And I spoke the corn,
And I cried the clover up, with the dewy mouth of my mirth.
In the honey of summer my brain conceived: a child, I flowered
Over the maiden-stalks, drinking sweet upper light,
For I was intimate with the sun, till he devoured
Me utterly, O Heart, his tenderest neophyte.
So I died. Small gluttonous birds picked on my limpid brow,
My pale drooped feet were manacled with rushing worms;
And when I was sufficiently dead (Torturer Thou!)
I was born again. Dissolving, memory reforms
The cyclic hour I pulled life’s bony root, slow inch
By inch, from its loamy trap; shrilly, like a mandrake, screamed
To rip the cord, suck liberal air, after the pinch
Of planetary rock. Womanly, a shadow combed
Her dark tremendous hair beyond the violet border
Of my sleep. Strong passionate hands I had, but could not find
The red position of her heart, nor the subtle order
Of her lips and breasts, nor the breathing cities of her mind.
Lovingly, lovingly, I wept for her absent eyes,
Large pity of her thought; I broke the spine of my pride
Upon a stone, seeing she did not recognize
My tears, because our sorrows did not coincide.
Softly grieving, ironic with a smile forlorn,
I took my baffled head and buried it under the corn.
O Heart: this is a dream I had, or not a dream.

DECIDUOUS BRANCH

WINTER, that coils in the thickets now,
Will glide from the fields; the swinging rain
Be knotted with flowers; on every bough
A bird will meditate again.
Lord, in the night if I should die,
Who entertained your thrilling worm,
Corruption wastes more than the eye
Can pick from this imperfect form.
I lie awake, hearing the drip
Upon my sill; thinking, the sun
Has not been promised; we may strip
Passion to seed, and be undone.
Bleed, as the antler of the eaves
Vanishes, drop by drop. I brood
On a Christian thing: unless the leaves
Perish, the tree is not renewed.
If all our perishable stuff
Be nourished to its rot, we clean
Our trunk of death, and in our tough
And final growth are evergreen.

THE WORDS OF THE PREACHER

TAKING infection from the vulgar air
And sick with the extravagant disease
Of life, my soul rejected the sweet snare
Of happiness; declined
That democratic bait, set in the world
By fortune’s old and mediocre mind.
To love a changing shape with perfect faith
Is waste of faith; to follow dying things
With deathless hope is vain; to go from breath
To breath, so to be fed
And put to sleep, is cheat and shame—because
By piecemeal living a man is doomed, I said.
For time with clever fingers ties the knot
Of life that is extended like a rope,
And bundling up the spinning of our thought
(The ribbons and the lace
That might have made a garment for the wind),
Constricts our substance to a cipher’s space.
Into the middle of my thought I crept
And on the bosom of the angel lay,
Lived all my life at once; and oh I wept
My own future to be;
Upon his death-soft burning plumage wept
To vie with God for His eternity.

MENS CREATRIX

BRAIN, be ice,
A frozen bowl of thought,
Pure radius of the marble eye
That is time’s central spot:
In cold eternal calm
Chasten the trembling thigh.
Brain, brain:
Be fever’s sepulcher,
Entomb the noise of frightened blood,
That I may strictly hear
The truthful pulse of beauty
Beyond this evil good.
Mental womb,
Intelligence of tight
Precision: He comes, the sudden Lord,
A rhythmic Spike of Light,
To cleave you with that spike:
Himself, His flowing Word.
Strike, O Poem, Strike!

AMBERGRIS

THIS body, tapped of every drop of breath,
In vast corruption of its swollen pride,
Is perfected to be the whale of death;
Yet, I believe, the hand that plumbs its side
Will gather dissolution’s sweet increase,
Exquisite fern of death—in nature, ambergris.
Meanwhile, thinking of love, I have been dressed
For such destruction. Though it surely break,
Come pluck the deep wild kernel of my breast,
That wafer of devotion, and partake
Of its compacted sweetness, till it bring
The soul to rise upon the fleshly wing.
If gentle hearts are scorned, in scorn of it
I shall immerse it in such bitterness,
Bathe every pulse in such an acid wit,
That from my mammoth, cold, and featureless
Event of age, my enemies will flee,
Whereas my friends will stay and pillage me.

APPROACH OF AUTUMN

THE early violets we saw together,
Lifting their delicate swift heads
As if to dip them in the water, now wither,
Arching no more like thoroughbreds.
Slender and pale, they flee the rime
Of death: the ghosts of violets
Are running in a dream. Heart-flowering time
Decays, green goes, and the eye forgets.
Forgets? But what spring-blooded stock
Sprouts deathless violets in the skull,
That, pawing on the hard and bitter rock
Of reason, make thinking beautiful?

SOUL’S ADVENTURE

I HEARD the centuries tick slowly,
Earth’s pulse equivocate. O Lord,
Gigantic silence strikes: Thy holy
And undeniable Word.
This is the bitter promised day
When, dragging wings, I leave behind
A faun-like head upon a tray,
Spear buried in the mind.
Now I must tread the starry wrack
And penetrate the burning sea.
Iscariot, I may come back,
But do not wait for me.

HE

HE runs before the wise men: He
Is moving on the hills like snow.
No gifts, no tears, no company
He brings, but wind-rise and water-flow.
In meadows of descended day
His motion leans, dividing air:
He takes the unforgiving way
Beneath the apostolic star.
Mary, Mary, call Him Stranger.
Parting the night’s long hair, He steals
Within the heart, that humble manger
Where the white, astonished spirit kneels.
His vertical inflicting pride,
Whose shadow cuts the nib of space,
Bends to this virtue fructified.
But though He kiss the little face
Like rapture breaking on the mind,
The necessary fierce details
Implacably He has designed.
Redemption hangs upon the nails.

VERY TREE

FORGET the tube of bark,
Alliterative leaves,
Tenacious like a hand
Gnarled rootage in the dark
Interior of land.
Bright incidental bird
Whose melody is fanned
Among the bundled sheaves,
Wild spool of the winding word,
Reject: and let there be
Only tree.
Earth’s absolute arithmetic
Of being is not in the flowering stick
Filled with the sperm of sun,
But in a figure seen
By second eyes when we close
Slow petals of the brain
At evening like a rose.
Colors pour in and out:
Here is a timeless structure wrought
Like the candelabrum of pure thought,
Stripped of green root and leaf,
Getting no seed to sprout,
Yet lovely, lovely,
God’s Very Tree,
Form of whose intense inner life
Abstractly branches to attain
What glory, Tree, what pain?

PROPHECY ON LETHE

ECHO, the beating of the tide,
Infringes on the blond curved shore;
Archaic weeds from sleep’s green side
Bind skull and pelvis till the four
Seasons of the blood are unified.
Anonymous sweet carrion,
Blind mammal floating on the stream
Of depthless sound, completely one
In the cinnamon-dark of no dream—
A pod of silence, bursting when the sun
Clings to the forehead, will surprise
The gasping turtle and the leech
With your strange brain blooming as it lies
Abandoned to the bipeds on the beach;
Your jelly-mouth and, crushed, your polyp eyes.

RAPE OF THE LEAF

WATERED by light, this done catastrophe
Was written in the seed. Who shall condemn
My wintry hand for leaping in a tree
To tear a tender pattern from its stem?
I swear no malice pulled the mental string
Of fate’s deflowering arm. I count it grief
To contradict the buds, to murder spring
In summer’s blood, by this lone crumpled leaf.
All shade, all greenness, rolled into a ball,
Are prisoners of my palm. And shall I let,
Like autumn, vegetation’s empire fall,
Or stay the curve of time, so to forget
The imminence of God’s great roving eye?
Electric of my heart, we cannot shun
That fatal stare. But while the buzzards cry,
Wear not a scarlet jacket in the sun.

POSTSCRIPT

DARLING, darling, by narrow ambages
Of fate, by gardens flowering with beasts,
I came unto this place. The forest marches
Behind the stalker, and the running grass
Steps lightly over his defeated bones.
This is the perilous way without return.
In glassy prison now of contemplation
I, fugitive from progress, leap erect
In analytic dance on time’s acute
And bitter needle. Crueler than a spine
It penetrates the body till it pricks
The bubbling brain, exploding life’s gray tumor
Together with its iridescent world.
I lost by winning, and I shall not win
Again except by loss. The smoky past,
Mixed with the wind, will not evaporate
Into the color of air. Let life be false,
But in our circular trap the blood remembers
Its throbbing on the lip; the hands observe
Communion, touching in the sleep of thought;
And the punctual heart reiterates love’s name.
Some little comfort I have found to think
That, though this phœnix will not hatch an egg,
Yet will its lyric history be saved
In generations of its mental brood.
And I have found some little comfort too
In colloquy with death the quiet-eyed,
Our profound and inexhaustible old father,
Still loyal to his tall obedient sons.
I have been social with the pale abstractions
That congregate within a lethal room;
But these strict walls encounter me; this house
Exhales resentment of audacious hope.
A man can starve upon the golden-sweet
Impossible apples of Cézanne; a man
Can eagerly consult a woman’s head
(Picasso’s), but her slow and stupid eyes
Drink light in vegetative apathy.
O darling, a man can cry unto his love
All night and day, and still be comfortless.
The meaning of a mouth, a breast, is plain,
But what you mean to me is dipped in blood
And tangled like the bright threads of a dream.

THUMB-NAIL BIOGRAPHY

DISEASE has profited
Her soul, that now can shake
From it the flower that is dead;
Scatter old ache
From her identity;
Distilling in each vein
Mature and steady ecstasy
Of blood and brain.
As delicate knobs of bloom
Beneath electric light
Accelerate their constant doom
In the false Bright,
Her dim corolla-love,
Believing there was sun,
Received too early shivering proof
Of corruption.
Nourished by any rain,
Blest in whatever spring,
Her seed will not be stirred again
With blossoming;
Whose incorruptible stem
Persists by growth, and stands
Lovely ... impregnable to limb,
Eyes, hands....

LOVERS RELENTLESSLY

LOVERS relentlessly contend to be
Superior in their identity:
The compass of the ego is designed
To circumscribe intact a lesser mind
With definition; tender thought would wrest
Each clean protective secret from the breast;
Affection’s eyes go deep, make morbid lesion
In pride’s tissue, are ferocious with possession;
Love’s active hands insistently caress
The quivering body of shy loveliness,
Hands that are desperately moved to own
The subtly reasoned flesh on branching bone;
Lovers regard the simple moon that spills
White magic in a garden, bend their wills
Obliquely on each other; lovers eat
The small ecstatic heart to be complete;
Engaged in complicate analysis
Of passionate destruction, lovers kiss;
In furious involvement they would make
A double meaning single. Some must break
Upon the wheel of love, but not the strange,
The secret lords, whom only death can change.

DEATH IN MOONLIGHT

A LEOPARD no more secret
Is than she who goes
By night alone, observing
Moon-foam upon the rose;
A doe is not more gentle
Than she who palely treads
Through peonies’ white clusters,
Brushing small rabbit-heads;
Her steps are light as dewdrops
Among imagined sheep,
Timid that she may startle
A herd of rocks from sleep;
She tarries for a moment
Beside a sky-deep pond
To watch a floating turtle;
Enchanted, moves beyond
To greet a glittering forest,
A tall and starry town.
Supple, her proud sweet body
Crying plunges down.

REGARD OF TANGENTS

THE flesh has knowledge of the flesh.
Lean hip and deep familiar breast
Encounter opposites. Melodiously
Beats (O beats!) the bringing bird of wish.
So has the adult thirsty bread
Been dipped in song: still is a thirst
Intrinsic in the body’s briefest crumb,
As shapes of thought go snuggling to a bed
Where double joy may singly lie,
Or once might probably have lain.
For love is coming or is passing by,
And none may look upon her features plain.
How shall these tarry, how shall these meet,
When he must remember and she forget?
Her baby-heart is running down a street
Already ended, his to a place not yet.

ANY HISTORY

INVOLVING in an active knot
The nimble members of our thought,
Rigid we lean, our bodies straining
To the lifting rhythms of the blood;
With eyes, with lips, with hands, explaining
This passion of the double rood.
Though mind’s tall swaying organisms,
Like pulsing flowers, twist head on head,
As pricked with cruel antagonisms
They spring out of a common bed,
Be reconciled. Soon will be over
The hot war, the heart’s loud argument:
Calm lover then will lie with lover
In snug and arrowy content,
Yet long to feel the leaping thunder
Of desire, the vesseled lightning burn,
And grieve to hold a wild quick wonder
Made familiar. Then we shall turn
Tame faces to the wall to weep,
And timidly, like children, sleep.

FOR PROSERPINE

OUR purple tongues that testify
The pomegranate has been broken
Are stained, their roots and buds are stained, with the shy
Fruity pleasure of us, met, spoken.
(I shall remember the days
Of my youth and your beautiful new ways.)
In fierce decay I’ll find a stripe
Of honey sweetening the tart
Old brain. I shall not know again such ripe
Beauty of the burst, dark heart.
(I’ll think of my absurd,
Impossible, pledged, serious word.)
My undivulged interior world
A country for our souls shall be,
Till I am done with name and number, gnarled
And mindless like a babbling tree.
(A heavy bird will brood
On women stagnant in their blood.)
Preserve you from the long farewell
Whose sex is flowers, whose breasts are grain.
Return, return. Into a leafless hell
Gradually drops the brain.
(The bulls, the stallions, have tasted
Incredible fruit. Their seed is wasted.)

WHEN THE DEAD ARISE

WHEN the dead arise,
(You know me, Lazarus)
When the resurrected generations climb
Into the orb of time,
Rubbing death from their eyes,
(O dark mad Lazarus)
When this maggoty dumb earth
Pronounces verbs erect and vertebrate,
Will the sexes flow with sweet
Wild honey of God’s mirth?
Or will they stare
Bewildered at ascending noon;
Then turn, and leap with frightened hair
(Lazarus! Lazarus!)
In utter pits of marble sleep
Unbetrayably down.

DISSECT THIS SILENCE

DISSECT this Silence: is it sweet and firm
And long, the brain’s mysterious white Worm?
Anatomize this symmetry that winds
Voluptuously till itself it finds,
Pale body flowing from a lean cold head,
Flowing like water to the profound dead.
Since Silence feeds on silence, can there be,
Can there become, less Silence? Chastity
And solitude and wintry sleep invite
The pale and beautiful Hermaphrodite.
Dissect this Silence: though it seem pure form,
Yet will you find much blood within this Worm.
And though it seem compounded of still air
Beyond the memory of sound, beware
The loud, the unbelievable hurt cries
Of the subtle creature you would analyze.
Dissect then if you will, O curious child,
But leave the Heart of Silence undefiled.

PARTING

PARTING, I take with me completed June,
Remembered hoard of time in thought compact;
Eventual winds will not dissolve a tune
Of solid air, the body of this fact.
Mind’s acres are forever green: Oh, I
Shall keep perpetual summer here; I shall
Refuse to let one startled swallow die,
One petal of this colored beauty fall.
Here, wandered from confusion, I shall greet
My youth immaculate in memory’s urn;
This is my country, where the tireless feet
Of my adventure, homing, will return.
Each day will end in this day; every ship
Will bring me back, bright lip on lonely lip.

I DREAMED THAT I WAS OLD

I DREAMED that I was old: in stale declension
Fallen from my prime, when company
Was mine, cat-nimbleness, and green invention,
Before time took my leafy hours away.
My wisdom, ripe with body’s ruin, found
Itself tart recompense for what was lost
In false exchange: since wisdom in the ground
Has no apocalypse or pentecost.
I wept for my youth, sweet passionate young thought,
And cozy women dead that by my side
Once lay: I wept with bitter longing, not
Remembering how in my youth I cried.

NIGHT-PIECE

AND everywhere, all over, men have sighed
Good-night, remembering of women the bright
Of eyes; put out their bodies like a light,
And set their brains adrift upon their blood.
Let us be shy again like feathered things,
Stroll in the gardens of the spectrum (all
Last summer). Waiting for the first snowfall,
Hear colors dropping, and the dark flurry of wings.
Prevent that deepmost dream. Think late, think soon,
Of crickets, Marvell, roses, and the bare
Shoulders of teasing Venus, and O the hair
Tumbling all over, everywhere, the moon.
Up ever so many stairs it is a new
Sweet (look! it’s) morning in each other’s arms.
Tell me, yes I truly, by what charms
Have I been, darling, yes I really do.
I think that it is so: but did I scream
Out of my middle sleep, believe I saw
The great fish tunneling the purple sea,
Earth-darkening bird suspended over dream.

INVASIONS

WE two. And so? But if the bell should pounce
On us, our shadows beating on the wall;
But if commotion shake the dark, announce
(Floating up the staircase to the hall)
Some body staring at the door—no any word,
No any not at all, eliminates that Third.
We are not here: not all of us is here.
Men carry in the streets, forgotten quite,
Kept parcels of our lives ... a day, a year.
The mirrors of my honest love are bright
And steal your attitudes. Your flowing name is signed
And countersigned. I wrap you in green folds of mind.
Smiling and smiling, when the crumpled hand
Of your farewell will linger in the air,
Death like a photograph will, taken, stand
In hallways of my heart, on every stair.
(Shadows and bells.) Death in your image, entering me,
Will drag my clinging spirit out, lovingly.

ME AND THE ROCK

ENDLESSLY to no end wending
Pilgrim O my conscience in the green
Nacre of twilight abbreviate the heart
Autumn’s beak is to the south
Death is north; westward one minute late
The plumed train leaps the shrilly stark ravine
Ever go feet go cars go the planes
Hearing the motors of the breast the brain
Loudly I wait their destinations wait
Coals of remembrance kissed and broken
These are the eyes; treasure the moment pure
Arrived at beauty impossible and vain
Now between me and the rock is
Now between me and myself is
Sight of the rock thought of myself: division sure
Then will the mouth of the air open
Cold slowly desolation pour over the blind
Punctures of sleep great gorges of the mind
Render me imperturbable to the rock
Deliver to myself completely me

THOU UNBELIEVING HEART

LADY that flutters in the bridal cage
Waiting love’s absent lord,
Count not the coinage of the sun
So artlessly. Have you not seen
The loping stranger pictured on your floor?
Innocent Lady, have you not heard
The beast that thunders at your door?
You have spent your female faith
In him whom you denied;
You have sent him to his death,
And he went forth proud
With his hawk and his meek-eyed hound.
Lady, the bird still screams,
The old dog licks his hand,
Do not study your dreams.
The feet of your lord in swift
Pursuit are terrible
Like flames. When you are left
No longer beautiful,
A tumbled tower of bone,
Still will he follow that death,
With hawk and hound in vain,
While you, for lack of faith,
Shall scream and catch your breath.
Lady that flutters in the bridal cage
Waiting love’s absent lord,
The beast he hunts and may not find
Is hunting you who shall be found.
Erase the picture from your floor.
Innocent Lady, you have heard
The lion thunder at your door.

SAD SONG

I MARRIED me a fay,
I was a merry gnome;
The wind stole my love away,
In the dark the whistler came.
I married me a fay.
Sweet Bird, Sweet Bird, fly home.
Nine candles in a row,
White sisters of the flame,
Breathe lilies of my woe.
When sorrowing is dumb
Nine candles in a row
Cry softly her sweet name.
I married me a fay,
I am a withered gnome;
My love comes not to-day,
Nor will she ever come.
I eat the stale last crumb
For marrying a fay,
Sweet Bird who flies not home.

ELEMENTAL METAMORPHOSIS

ALL night he ran, his body air,
But that was in another year.
Lately the answered shape of his laughter,
The shape of his smallest word, is fire.
He who is a fierce young crier
Of poems will be tranquil as water,
Keeping, in aged rose calm, one sure
Set image depthlessly secure;
Then enter earth and come to be,
Inch by inch, geography.

FIRST LOVE

AT his incipient sun
The ice of twenty winters broke,
Crackling, in her eyes.
Her mirroring, still mind,
That held the world (made double) calm,
Went fluid, and it ran.
There was a stir of music,
Mixed with flowers, in her blood;
A swift impulsive balm
From obscure roots; gold bees
Of clinging light swarmed in her brow.
This Beautiful is good,
This Wonderful is true.
Love’s large, slow, motherly hands have touched
Like years: quietly now
The blind impalpable lids
Of prescient selves, opening, start
Upon an astral view.
Her throat is full of songs,
She hums, she is sensible of wings
Growing on her heart.
She is a tree in spring
Trembling with the hope of leaves,
Of which the leaves are tongues.

LAST WORDS

LISTEN: from sleep’s long pillow I arise
To go away. One moment let me lean
On falling air before I lock my eyes.
Are the leaves red now? No matter. Trees are green.
The colors of the world are permanent
Despite the bleach of change. Pure stain on stain
The bow of light’s eternal forms is bent
Across steep heaven in the general brain.
Who cries, The beautiful, the proud, are fallen!
(O silly child, it was myself that cried.)
Death, eater of the heads of flowers, spills pollen:
Our little strength, our beauty, and our pride
Are for the race to keep; we can discover
Secrets with our broken skulls; our dead feet run
Under the lid of earth that closes over
The generations marching to the sun.

EAGLE

THE dwindling pole,
Tall perpendicular in air,
Attenuates to be a bird
Poised on a sphere.
No flag projects
This tensile grace, this needle-word,
Only, in rigid attitude,
The ball, the bird.
Metallic time
Has caught an eagle, trapped the beat
Of rushing wings, ensnared in bronze
His taloned feet.
Invader of
The thunder, never will you fly
Again to pluck the blazing heart.
Shall I? Shall I?

A DAUGHTER OF THE SUN IS SHE

A DAUGHTER of the sun is she,
Delicate and neat,
Whom a divine geometry
Has made complete.
The subtle air was spun with fire
For a body bright and wild,
Immaculate in clean desire,
A strange wise child.
With elemental grace of wind
Her symmetry is plain;
Precisely is each thought defined
In her dainty brain.
Her secret will not keep the night.
What will her lover say
When, springing on a horse of light,
She rides away?

MOTION OF WISH

THROUGH evolutions of the seed
To startled postures of the dead,
The motion of important wish
Is simpler than the motion of a fish
In water, or a bird in air.
Sprung from the brain, it will return there.
Possessed by objects, wish may find
Mastery only in the mind.
So when the sighing of the shoal,
The tropic birds, the monotonous roll
Of seasons over the island soul,
Confuse hope’s mirror, mariners eat
One lotus-moment to forget
All other moments, and their eyes
Fasten on impossible surprise.
A man may journey to the sun,
But his one true love and companion
Sleeps curled in his thoughtful womb.
Here will the lone life-traveler come
To find himself infallibly home.

SO INTRICATELY IS THIS WORLD RESOLVED

SO intricately is this world resolved
Of substance arched on thrust of circumstance,
The earth’s organic meaning so involved,
That none may break the pattern of his dance;
Lest, deviating, he confound the line
Of reason with the destiny of race,
And, altering the perilous design,
Bring ruin like a rain on time and space.
Lover, it is good to lie in the sweet grass
With a dove-soft nimble girl. But O lover,
Lift no destroying hand; let fortune pass
Unchallenged, beauty sleep; dare not to cover
Her mouth with kisses by the garden wall,
Lest, cracking in bright air, a planet fall.

BENEDICTION

GOD banish from your house
The fly, the roach, the mouse
That riots in the walls
Until the plaster falls;
Admonish from your door
The hypocrite and liar;
No shy, soft, tigrish fear
Permit upon your stair,
Nor agents of your doubt.
God drive them whistling out.
Let nothing touched with evil,
Let nothing that can shrivel
Heart’s tenderest frond, intrude
Upon your still, deep blood.
Against the drip of night
God keep all windows tight,
Protect your mirrors from
Surprise, delirium,
Admit no trailing wind
Into your shuttered mind
To plume the lake of sleep
With dreams. If you must weep
God give you tears, but leave
You secrecy to grieve,
And islands for your pride,
And love to nest in your side.
God grant that, to the bone,
Yourself may be your own;
God grant that I may be
(My sweet) sweet company.

PROMENADE ON ANY STREET

HE passes through the crowd,
Inimical and proud.
Beneath the shifting sky
He bears young majesty,
A secret crown of stars
Among the whistling cars.
Under his springing heels,
Cleft shadow-roots, he feels
The massive planet turning.
Through pinioned heaven burning
Marches his eager head,
Seeking, as light runs red,
A virginal release
From motion, April peace;
While muddy feet patrol
The carpet of a soul
That falls like snow between
The mob and the machine.
None hears his heart cry, Stop!
None takes his echo up.
Beneath his gray felt hat
Leaps thought, the acrobat.

WHO TEARS THE SERPENT FROM THE FLESH

ITS evil head that gnaws the breast
Is beautiful and bright,
Emblazoned with a jeweled crest,
Red plume of light.
The body of its reptile grace,
Glitter of gold and green,
Winds rippling in fastidious chase
Of heart’s meat clean.
Who tears the serpent from the flesh
To stamp a bloody seal,
And laughs, inflicting gash on gash
With his iron heel,
Will thirst to fill in spirit’s drought
The vacant well of pain,
And stoop to kiss the serpent’s mouth,
And kiss in vain.

IN A STRANGE HOUSE

THE memory of time is here imprisoned
In these walls, not fluent time that moves
Upon the flood, but time already reasoned
And undone of its quick eyes and loves.
We who are strangers in this finished house
Have slept with noiseless shadows, and we lie
Astonished in our chambers lest we rouse
The sleeping moments with an awful cry.
The dead would murder action. Oh I know
Their subtle ways. They separate with fear
The fiery lips of thought. And I shall go
By silent lanes and leave you timeless here.

MASTER AND MISTRESS

AS if I were composed of dust and air,
The shape confronting me upon the stair
(Athlete of shadow, lighted by a stain
On its disjunctive breast—I saw it plain—)
Moved through my middle flesh. I turned around,
Shaken, and it was marching without sound
Beyond the door; and when my hand was taken
From my mouth to beat the standing heart, I cried
My distant name, thinking myself had died.
One moment I was entered; one moment then
I knew a bounded century of pain
Between the twinkling of two thoughts. The ghost
Knocked on my ribs, demanding, “Host! Host!
I am diseased with motion. Give me bread
Before I quickly go. Shall I be fed?”
Straightly I yielded up: “Partake of me.
Whatever runneth from the artery,
This body and its unfamiliar wine,
Stored in whatever dark of love, are thine.”
But he denied me, saying, “Every part
Of thee is given, yea, thy flesh, thy heart.”

ORGANIC BLOOM

THE brain constructs its systems to enclose
The steady paradox of thought and sense;
Momentously its tissued meaning grows
To solve and integrate experience.
But life escapes closed reason. We explain
Our chaos into cosmos, cell by cell,
Only to learn of some insidious pain
Beyond the limits of our charted hell;
Only to find a startling grief, a sin
Incredible and true. So, vast and vaster
The plasmic circles of gray discipline
Spread outward to include each new disaster.
Enormous floats the brain’s organic bloom
Till, bursting like a fruit, it scatters doom.

BEYOND REASON

THE blessing in this conscious fruit, the hurt
Which is unanswerable, fill the brow
With early death. O Sion of my heart,
The milk of love were charitable now.
I do not come intent to be your lord,
Nor to contract the empire of your flight,
But as the long eye holds the spinning bird
Enclosed in the circumference of sight
And yet the bird is infinitely free
To dip its beak into the thinnest air,
So do I stand. I am not destiny
To color time or plot a hemisphere.
Creatures that carry in their little blood
Malignant influences moved to keep
Delight from love, the lonely from the proud,
Destroy themselves to live. If in my sleep
The ape, the serpent, and the fox I find
Shut with my soul in fortune’s writhing sack,
I tame them with the sections of my mind
And teach my mind to love its thoughtless crack.

VITA NUOVA

I ABDICATE my daily self that bled,
As others breathe, for porridge it might sup.
Henceforth apocalypse will get my bread
For me. I bit my tongue and gnawed my lip,
But now the visor of my name is up.
Giving to love my undivided nature,
Cherishing beauty with the breath I keep,
I have been otherwise a part-time creature,
With many selves to fool myself with hope,
And in myself a gentler self to weep.
Now I will peel that vision from my brain
Of numbers wrangling in a common place,
And I will go, unburdened, on the quiet lane
Of my eternal kind, till shadowless
With inner light I wear my father’s face.
Moon of the soul, accompany me now,
Shine on the coliseums of my sense,
Be in the tabernacles of my brow.
My dark will make, reflecting thee at once,
The single beam of all my life intense.