This devils me: uneasy ease at my window
discussing the day with quince, flowers of the quince
almost upon me in tree time, in slow
dazzles of budding and bending asprawl since
Spring began my consideration again
of the angels of the blind eye. This must mean
the angels sing from the many-folded falls
of the open light, from the twist and gnarl and sheen
of the airy works of the tree, from the writhen scrawls
and mobile arms of its tilt and balancing.
But at once the wind shakes free a fall of light
from undiminished light, the light-machine
sends and goes in an ample-handed sleight.
This devils me: can worlds be made to mean
whatever they are about when they shape a tree?
can the angel-blinded eye be made to enter
a presence without intent whose devils sprawl
calmer than angels in the windborne center
of the quince-bursting Spring? is quince a moral?
The form of a tree is a function of the air
and its only possibility, say the devils.
But the eye sees by religions and recollections.
What shall the green bough care for rites and revels
or the angel imagination whose paeans
moralize the strictness of God’s chains
in a world that cannot worship but only answer
one urgency with another? Spring
is no more intricately bloomed than cancer,
nor than the dreams of angels which they fling
age after age at the invincible world.
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