To smother the wry spirit’s misery.
Inhale the purple fragrance. It becomes
Almost a nigger fragment, a mystique
For the spirit left helpless by the intelligence.
There’s a moment in the year, Solange,
When the deep breath fetches another year of life.
METAMORPHOSIS
Yillow, yillow, yillow,
Old worm, my pretty quirk,
How the wind spells out
Sep - tem - ber.…
Summer is in bones.
Cock-robin’s at Caracas.
Make o, make o, make o,
Oto - otu - bre.
And the rude leaves fall.
The rain falls. The sky
Falls and lies with the worms.
The street lamps
Are those that have been hanged,
Dangling in an illogical
To and to and fro
Fro Niz - nil - imbo.
CONTRARY THESES (I)
Now grapes are plush upon the vines.
A soldier walks before my door.
The hives are heavy with the combs.
Before, before, before my door.
And seraphs cluster on the domes,
And saints are brilliant in fresh cloaks.
Before, before, before my door.
The shadows lessen on the walls.
The bareness of the house returns.
An acid sunlight fills the halls.
Before, before. Blood smears the oaks.
A soldier stalks before my door.
PHOSPHOR READING BY HIS OWN LIGHT
It is difficult to read. The page is dark.
Yet he knows what it is that he expects.
The page is blank or a frame without a glass
Or a glass that is empty when he looks.
The greenness of night lies on the page and goes
Down deeply in the empty glass…
Look, realist, not knowing what you expect.
The green falls on you as you look,
Falls on and makes and gives, even a speech.
And you think that that is what you expect,
That elemental parent, the green night,
Teaching a fusky alphabet.
THE SEARCH FOR SOUND FREE FROM MOTION
All afternoon the gramophone
Parl-parled the West-Indian weather.
The zebra leaves, the sea
And it all spoke together.
The many-stanzaed sea, the leaves
And it spoke all together.
But you, you used the word,
Your self its honor.
All afternoon the gramaphoon,
All afternoon the gramaphoon,
The world as word,
Parl-parled the West-Indian hurricane.
The world lives as you live,
Speaks as you speak, a creature that
Repeats its vital words, yet balances
The syllable of a syllable.
JUMBO
The trees were plucked like iron bars
And jumbo, the loud general-large
Singsonged and singsonged, wildly free.
Who was the musician, fatly soft
And wildly free, whose clawing thumb
Clawed on the ear these consonants?
Who the transformer, himself transformed,
Whose single being, single form
Were their resemblances to ours?
The companion in nothingness,
Loud, general, large, fat, soft
And wild and free, the secondary man,
Cloud-clown, blue painter, sun as horn,
Hill-scholar, man that never is,
The bad-bespoken lacker,
Ancestor of Narcissus, prince
Of the secondary men. There are no rocks
And stones, only this imager.
CONTRARY THESES (II)
One chemical afternoon in mid-autumn,
When the grand mechanics of earth and sky were near,
Even the leaves of the locust were yellow then,
He walked with his year-old boy on his shoulder.
The sun shone and the dog barked and the baby slept.
The leaves, even of the locust, the green locust.
He wanted and looked for a final refuge,
From the bombastic intimations of winter
And the martyrs à la mode. He walked toward
An abstract, of which the sun, the dog, the boy
Were contours. Cold was chilling the wide-moving swans.
The leaves were falling like notes from a piano.
The abstract was suddenly there and gone again.
The negroes were playing football in the park.
The abstract that he saw, like the locust-leaves, plainly:
The premiss from which all things were conclusions,
The noble, Alexandrine verve. The flies
And the bees still sought the chrysanthemums’ odor.
THE HAND AS A BEING
In the first canto of the final canticle,
Too conscious of too many things at once,
Our man beheld the naked, nameless dame,
Seized her and wondered: why beneath the tree
She held her hand before him in the air,
For him to see, wove round her glittering hair.
Too conscious of too many things at once,
In the first canto of the final canticle,
Her hand composed him and composed the tree.
The wind had seized the tree and ha, and ha,
It held the shivering, the shaken limbs,
Then bathed its body in the leaping lake.
Her hand composed him like a hand appeared,
Of an impersonal gesture, a stranger’s hand.
He was too conscious of too many things
In the first canto of the final canticle.
Her hand took his and drew him near to her.
Her hair fell on him and the mi-bird flew
To the ruddier bushes at the garden’s end.
Of her, of her alone, at last he knew
And lay beside her underneath the tree.
OAK LEAVES ARE HANDS
In Hydaspia, by Howzen,
Lived a lady, Lady Lowzen,
For whom what is was other things.
Flora she was once. She was florid
A bachelor of feen masquerie,
Evasive and metamorphorid.
Mac Mort she had been, ago,
Twelve-legged in her ancestral hells,
Weaving and weaving many arms.
Even now, the centre of something else,
Merely by putting hand to brow,
Brooding on centuries like shells.
As the acorn broods on former oaks
In memorials of Northern sound,
Skims the real for its unreal,
So she in Hydaspia created
Out of the movement of few words,
Flora Lowzen invigorated
Archaic and future happenings,
In glittering seven-colored changes,
By Howzen, the chromatic Lowzen.
EXAMINATION OF THE HERO IN A TIME OF WAR
I
Force is my lot and not pink-clustered
Roma ni Avignon ni Leyden,
And cold, my element. Death is my
Master and, without light, I dwell. There
The snow hangs heavily on the rocks, brought
By a wind that seeks out shelter from snow. Thus
Each man spoke in winter. Yet each man spoke of
The brightness of arms, said Roma wasted
In its own dirt, said Avignon was
Peace in a time of peace, said Leyden
Was always the other mind. The brightness
Of arms, the will opposed to cold, fate
In its cavern, wings subtler than any mercy,
These were the psalter of their sybils.
II
The Got whome we serve is able to deliver
Us. Good chemistry, good common man, what
Of that angelic sword? Creature of
Ten times ten times dynamite, convulsive
Angel, convulsive shatterer, gun,
Click, click, the Got whom we serve is able,
Still, still to deliver us, still magic,
Still moving yet motionless in smoke, still
One with us, in the heaved-up noise, still
Captain, the man of skill, the expert
Leader, the creator of bursting color
And rainbow sortilege, the savage weapon
Against enemies, against the prester,
Presto, whose whispers prickle the spirit.
III
They are sick of each old romance, returning,
Of each old revolving dance, the music
Like a euphony in a museum
Of euphonies, a skin from Nubia,
A helio-horn. How strange the hero
To this accurate, exacting eye. Sight
Hangs heaven with flash drapery. Sight
Is a museum of things seen. Sight,
In war, observes each man profoundly.
Yes. But these sudden sublimations
Are to combat what his exaltations
Are to the unaccountable prophet or
What any fury to its noble centre.
IV
To grasp the hero, the eccentric
On a horse, in a plane, at the piano—
At the piano, scales, arpeggios
And chords, the morning exercises,
The afternoon’s reading, the night’s reflection,
That’s how to produce a virtuoso.
The drill of a submarine. The voyage
Beyond the oyster-beds, indigo
Shadow, up the great sea and downward
And darkly beside the vulcanic
Sea-tower, sea-pinnacles, sea-mountain.
The signal … The sea-tower, shaken,
Sways slightly and the pinnacles frisson.
The mountain collapses. Chopiniana.
V
The common man is the common hero.
The common hero is the hero.
Imprimatur. But then there’s common fortune,
Induced by what you will: the entrails
Of a cat, twelve dollars for the devil,
A kneeling woman, a moon’s farewell;
And common fortune, induced by nothing,
Unwished for, chance, the merest riding
Of the wind, rain in a dry September,
The improvisations of the cuckoos
In a clock-shop.… Soldier, think, in the darkness,
Repeating your appointed paces
Between two neatly measured stations,
Of less neatly measured common-places.
VI
Unless we believe in the hero, what is there
To believe? Incisive what, the fellow
Of what good. Devise. Make him of mud,
For every day. In a civiler manner,
Devise, devise, and make him of winter’s
Iciest core, a north star, central
In our oblivion, of summer’s
Imagination, the golden rescue:
The bread and wine of the mind, permitted
In an ascetic room, its table
Red as a red table-cloth, its windows
West Indian, the extremest power
Living and being about us and being
Ours, like a familiar companion.
VII
Gazette Guerrière. A man might happen
To prefer L’Observateur de la Paix, since
The hero of the Gazette and the hero
Of L’Observateur, the classic hero
And the bourgeois, are different, much.
The classic changed. There have been many.
And there are many bourgeois heroes.
There are more heroes than marbles of them.
The marbles are pinchings of an idea,
Yet there is that idea behind the marbles,
The idea of things for public gardens,
Of men suited to public ferns … The hero
Glides to his meeting like a lover
Mumbling a secret, passionate message.
VIII
The hero is not a person. The marbles
Of Xenophon, his epitaphs, should
Exhibit Xenophon, what he was, since
Neither his head nor horse nor knife nor
Legend were part of what he was, forms
Of a still-life, symbols, brown things to think of
In brown books. The marbles of what he was stand
Like a white abstraction only, a feeling
In a feeling mass, a blank emotion,
An anti-pathos, until we call it
Xenophon, its implement and actor.
Obscure Satanas, make a model
Of this element, this force. Transfer it
Into a barbarism as its image.
IX
If the hero is not a person, the emblem
Of him, even if Xenophon, seems
To stand taller than a person stands, has
A wider brow, large and less human
Eyes and bruted ears: the man-like body
And lither stride. His arms are heavy
And his breast is greatness. All his speeches
Are prodigies in longer phrases.
His thoughts begotten at clear sources,
Apparently in air, fall from him
Like chantering from an abundant
Poet, as if he thought gladly, being
Compelled thereto by an innate music.
X
And if the phenomenon, magnified, is
Further magnified, sua voluntate,
Beyond his circumstance, projected
High, low, far, wide, against the distance,
In parades like several equipages,
Painted by mad-men, seen as magic,
Leafed out in adjectives as private
And peculiar and appropriate glory,
Even enthroned on rainbows in the sight
Of the fishes of the sea, the colored
Birds and people of this too voluminous
Air-earth—Can we live on dry descriptions,
Feel everything starving except the belly
And nourish ourselves on crumbs of whimsy?
XI
But a profane parade, the basso
Preludes a-rub, a-rub-rub, for him that
Led the emperor astray, the tom trumpets
Curling round the steeple and the people,
The elephants of sound, the tigers
In trombones roaring for the children,
Young boys resembling pastry, hip-hip,
Young men as vegetables, hip-hip,
Home and the fields give praise, hurrah, hip,
Hip, hip, hurrah. Eternal morning…
Flesh on the bones. The skeleton throwing
His crust away eats of this meat, drinks
Of this tabernacle, this communion,
Sleeps in the sun no thing recalling.
XII
It is not an image. It is a feeling.
There is no image of the hero.
There is a feeling as definition.
How could there be an image, an outline,
A design, a marble soiled by pigeons?
The hero is a feeling, a man seen
As if the eye was an emotion,
As if in seeing we saw our feeling
In the object seen and saved that mystic
Against the sight, the penetrating,
Pure eye. Instead of allegory,
We have and are the man, capable
Of his brave quickenings, the human
Accelerations that seem inhuman.
XIII
These letters of him
for the little,
The imaginative, ghosts that dally
With life’s salt upon their lips and savor
The taste of it, secrete within them
Too many references. The hero
Acts in reality, adds nothing
To what he does. He is the heroic
Actor and act but not divided.
It is a part of his conception,
That he be not conceived, being real.
Say that the hero is his nation,
In him made one, and in that saying
Destroy all references. This actor
Is anonymous and cannot help it.
XIV
A thousand crystals’ chiming voices,
Like the shiddow-shaddow of lights revolving
To momentary ones, are blended,
In hymns, through iridescent changes,
Of the apprehending of the hero.
These hymns are like a stubborn brightness
Approaching in the dark approaches
Of time and place, becoming certain,
The organic centre of responses,
Naked of hindrance, a thousand crystals.
To meditate the highest man, not
The highest supposed in him and over,
Creates, in the blissfuller perceptions,
What unisons create in music.
XV
The highest man with nothing higher
Than himself, his self, the self that embraces
The self of the hero, the solar single,
Man-sun, man-moon, man-earth, man-ocean,
Makes poems on the syllable fa or