THESE locusts by day, these crickets by night
Are the instruments on which to play
Of an old and disused ambit of the soul
Or of a new aspect, bright in discovery –
A disused ambit of the spirit’s way,
The sort of thing that August crooners sing,
By a pure fountain, that was a ghost, and is,
Under the sun-slides of a sloping mountain;
Or else a new aspect, say the spirit’s sex,
Its attitudes, its answers to attitudes
And the sex of its voices, as the voice of one
Meets nakedly anotier’s naked voice.
Nothing is lost, loud locusts. No note fails.
These sounds are long in the living of the ear.
The honky-tonk out of the somnolent grasses
Is a memorizing, a trying out, to keep.
2
We make, although inside an egg,
Variations on the words spread sail.
The morning-glories grow in the egg.
It is full of the myrrh and camphor of summer
And Adirondack glittering. The cat hawks it
And the hawk cats it and we say spread sail,
Spread sail, we say spread white, spread way.
The shell is a shore. The egg of the sea
And the egg of the sky are in shells, in walls, in skins
And the egg of the earth lies deep within an egg.
Spread outward. Crack the round dome. Break through.
Have liberty not as the air within a grave
Or down a well. Breathe freedom, oh, my native,
In the space of horizons that neither love nor hate.
3
High poetry and low:
Experience in perihelion
Or in the penumbra of summer night –
The solemn sentences,
Like interior intonations,
The speech of truth in its true solitude,
A nature that is created in what it says,
The peace of the last intelligence;
Or the same thing without desire,
He that in this intelligence
Mistakes it for a world of objects,
Which, being green and blue, appease him,
By chance, or happy chance, or happiness,
According to his thought, in the Mediterranean
Of the quiet of the middle of the night,
With the broken statues standing on the shore.
4
The sad smell of the lilacs – one remembered it,
Not as the fragrance of Persephone,
Nor of a widow Dooley,
But as of an exhumation returned to earth,
The rich earth, of its own self made rich,
Fertile of its own leaves and days and wars,
Of its brown wheat rapturous in the wind,
The nature of its women in the air,
The stern voices of its necessitous men,
This chorus as of those that wanted to live.
The sentiment of the fatal is a part
Of filial love. Or is it the element,
An approximation of an element,
A little thing to think of on Sunday walks,
Something not to be mentioned to Mrs. Dooley,
An arrogant dagger darting its arrogance,
In the parent’s hand, perhaps parental love?
One wished that there had been a season,
Longer and later, in which the lilacs opened
And spread about them a warmer, rosier odor
5
We’ll give the week-end to wisdom, to Weisheit, the rabbi,
Lucidity of his city, joy of his nation,
The state of circumstance.
The thinker as reader reads what has been written.
He wears the words he reads to look upon
Within his being,
A crown within him of crispest diamonds,
A reddened garment falling to his feet,
A hand of light to turn the page,
A finger with a ring to guide his eye
From line to line, as we lie on the grass and listen
To that which has no speech,
The voluble intentions of the symbols,
The ghostly celebrations of the picnic,
The secretions of insight.
6
The world imagines for the beholder.
He is born the blank mechanic of the mountains,
The blank frere of fields, their matin laborer.
He is the possessed of sense not the possessor.
He does not change the sea from crumpled tinfoil
To chromatic crawler. But it is changed.
He does not raise the rousing of fresh light
On the still, black-slatted Eastward shutters.
The woman is chosen but not by him,
Among the endlessly emerging accords.
The world? The inhuman as human? That which thinks not,
Feels not, resembling thought, resembling feeling?
It habituates him to the invisible,
By its faculty of the exceptional,
The faculty of ellipses and deviations,
In which he exists but never as himself.
7
He turned from the tower to the house,
From the spun sky and the high and deadly view,
To the novels on the table,
The geraniums on the sill.
He could understand the things at home.
And being up high had helped him when up high,
As if on a taller tower
He would be certain to see
That, in the shadowless atmosphere,
The knowledge of things lay round but unperceived:
The height was not quite proper;
The position was wrong.
It was curious to have to descend And,
seated in the nature of his chair,
To feel the satisfactions
Of that transparent air.
8
When was it that the particles became
The whole man, that tempers and beliefs became
Temper and belief and that differences lost
Difference and were one? It had to be
In the presence of a solitude of the self,
An expanse and the abstraction of an expanse,
A zone of time without the ticking of clocks,
A color that moved us with forgetfulness.
When was it that we heard the voice of union?
Was it as we sat in the park and the archaic form
Of a woman with a cloud on her shoulder, rose
Against the trees and then against the sky
And the sense of the archaic touched us at once
In a movement of the outlines of similarity?
We resembled one another at the sight.
The forgetful color of the autumn day
Was full of these archaic forms, giants
Of sense, evoking one thing in many men,
Evoking an archaic space, vanishing
In the space, leaving an outline of the size
Of the impersonal person, the wanderer,
The father, the ancestor, the bearded peer,
The total of human shadows bright as glass.
9
A new text of the world,
A scribble of fret and fear and fate,
From a bravura of the mind,
A courage of the eye,
In which, for all the breathings
From the edge of night,
And for all the white voices
That were rosen once,
The meanings are our own –
It is a text that we shall be needing,
To be the footing of noon,
The pillar of midnight,
That comes from ourselves, neither from knowing
Nor not knowing, yet free from question,
Because we wanted it so
And it had to be,
A text of intelligent men
At the center of the unintelligible,
As in a hermitage, for us to think,
Writing and reading the rigid inscription.
The mornings grow silent, the never-tiring wonder.
The trees are reappearing in poverty.
Without rain, there is the sadness of rain
And an air of lateness. The moon is a tricorn
Waved in pale adieu. The rex Impolitor
Will come stamping here, the ruler of less than men,
In less than nature. He is not here yet.
Here the adult one is still banded with fulgor,
Is still warm with the love with which she came,
Still touches solemnly with what she was
And willed. She has given too much, but not enough.
She is exhausted and a little old.
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