I
This blue world with its wide high sky of islands!
Pale cliffs, the slender point, the lighthouse white and sharp,
the little bay —
And over there, beyond the outer shore,
Its wildness and its silence,
Old kegs and bolts of wrecks embedded in hot snows,
Will sink in awful lavender and rose the red sea-faring sun —
This freedom of the sands, the summer new begun!
– But oh, my dear, among those dunes we lay,
And all the paths we left are drifted smooth
And we shall make no more! —
And death lies underneath
That cuts the world away.
II NIGHTMARE
And when they found the house was bare
The windows shuttered to the sun
They woke the panthers with a stare
To finish what they had begun
To finish what they had begun
To claw the walls like webs of grass
To gulp the blinds that blanked the sun
Parade their panoplies of brass
And when the panthers ate the brass
The walls the sun the house and all
They only watched the people pass
And lost their bleeding in the brawl
The house was gone
The light was out
The blood was spent
The panthers dead
And oh the labyrinth destroyed
Swept like a cobweb overhead
Swept down and no more labyrinth
III
Poured full of thin gold sun, September — houses white and
bare —
Red salvia and yellow sunflower on the gray boards and
pale air —
The village hush, dim children in the Sunday afternoon –
The insects in the straw-dry grass with their dry incessant
cry,
Day, night — I sleep among them, wake to find them.
So sat I,
In youth and long ago, before a book, alone,
Hearing the country afternoon, the dogs in back dirt streets.
Yet now all this —
Peace, brightness, the browned page, the crickets in the
grass —
Is but a crust that stretches thin and taut by which I pass
Above the loud abyss.
IV
The crows of March are barking in the wood
Alarmed they haarch-haarch and yar-yar-yar
They have their exits and their entrances
And one crow in his life plays several paarch
One crow mounts guaard-guaard in a tree
Gives yar-yar-yarning: all the parts are plain
So once in these sparse woods before the dark
All lyric, wild and lonely twanged their calling
At morning now who sleepless long have lain
Loveless, nervous, tired, torn,
Almost I envy sentinel and sleeping host
Almost I envy voices grown coarse-coarse that caw the morn.
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