Dry Apollo: His bright butterflies silently
Flutter among the gray greens; motionless
Lizards ablaze with black and olive, striped with darts
Of ochre, or spotted with everything,
Lounge on pocked steps. Carved not of the god’s regular
Marble-aflash even in ruin with
Something of his sunlight-their columns were flung up
From the unruly rocks dashed all about
Among the pale daisies and hard, unfruitful weeds.
They support only the unbearable
Blue of sky not, at this height, a true measure of
The faraway: distant thoughts of water,
Of silent coasts, unimaginable islands—
These mark where wideness is under the sun.
And there the fond, pictorial eye’s greater reach
Off southwestward frames a shadowless peak,
Where even the high travellers, poking about
Among those wolf-grey forms would shed no shade.
And now our eye is cast back at our stony feet.
What had been done here was done in green wood:
What do we do here now in the dry? -Remember:
Back up toward the north-northeast, at the green
Foot of a holy mountain, old water, deep, clear
And cold, had something to say of sunlight;
His touches of gold unwedded to her whispers
Of frosty stream, but wet, with caressing
Amusing surfaces, and with reading clear depths.
Not so with those three who bend over the
Fountain now: unquickened, the god who lies entombed
In the noon sunshine; and no legacy
Of his, the almost-enduring nymphs whose voices
Drown the rock talk and water murmuring
Deep below their discourse. Significances splash
Up to him, standing nearby, whose they are—
The Rememberer, unknowing yet of the dry
Heights that wait southward, and above no sea.
Remembering the Fountain
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