The Bridge
From going to and fro in the earth,
and from walking up and down in it.
-The Book Of Job
To Brooklyn Bridge
How many dawns, chill from his rippling rest
The seagull's wings shall dip and pivot him,
Shedding white rings of tumult, building high
Over the chained bay waters Liberty—
Then, with inviolate curve, forsake our eyes
As apparitional as sails that cross
Some page of figures to be filed away;
—Till elevators drop us from our day . . .
I think of cinemas, panoramic sleights
With multitudes bent toward some flashing scene
Never disclosed, but hastened to again,
Foretold to other eyes on the same screen;
And Thee, across the harbor, silver-paced
As though the sun took step of thee, yet left
Some motion ever unspent in thy stride,—
Implicitly thy freedom staying thee!
Out of some subway scuttle, cell or loft
A bedlamite speeds to thy parapets,
Tilting there momently, shrill shirt ballooning,
A jest falls from the speechless caravan.
Down Wall, from girder into street noon leaks,
A rip-tooth of the sky's acetylene;
All afternoon the cloud-flown derricks turn . . .
Thy cables breathe the North Atlantic still.
And obscure as that heaven of the Jews,
Thy guerdon . . . Accolade thou dost bestow
Of anonymity time cannot raise:
Vibrant reprieve and pardon thou dost show.
O harp and altar, of the fury fused,
(How could mere toil align thy choiring strings!)
Terrific threshold of the prophet's pledge,
Prayer of pariah, and the lover's cry,—
Again the traffic lights that skim thy swift
Unfractioned idiom, immaculate sigh of stars,
Beading thy path—condense eternity:
And we have seen night lifted in thine arms.
Under thy shadow by the piers I waited;
Only in darkness is thy shadow clear.
The City's fiery parcels all undone,
Already snow submerges an iron year . . .
O Sleepless as the river under thee,
Vaulting the sea, the prairies' dreaming sod,
Unto us lowliest sometime sweep, descend
And of the curveship lend a myth to G-d.
I
Ave Maria
Venient annis, saecula seris,
quibus Oceanus vincula rerum
laxet etingens pateat tellus
Tiphysque novos detegat orbes
nec sit terris ultima Thule.
-Seneca
Be with me, Luis de San Angel, now --
Witness before the tides can wrest away
The word I bring, O you who reined my suit
Into the Queen's great heart that doubtful day;
For I have seen now what no perjured breath
Of clown nor sage can riddle or gainsay; --
To you, too, Juan Perez, whose counsel fear
And greed adjourned, I bring you back Cathay!
Here waves climb into dusk on gleaming mail;
Invisible valves of the sea, -- locks, tendons
Crested and creeping, troughing corridors
That fall back yawning to another plunge.
Slowly the sun's red caravel drops light
Once more behind us...It is morning there --
O where our Indian emperies lie revealed,
Yet lost, all, let this keel one instant yield!
I thought of Genoa; and this truth, now proved,
That made me exile in her streets, stood me
More absolute than ever -- biding the moon
Till dawn should clear that dim frontier, first seen
-- the Chan's great continent... Then faith, not fear
Nigh surged me witless... Hearing the surf near --
I, wonder-breathing, kept the watch, -- saw
The first light chevron the first lighted hill.
And lowered. And they came out to us crying,
"The Great White Birds!" (O Madre Maria, still
One ship of these thou grantest safe returning;
Assure us through thy mantle's ageless blue!)
And record of more, floating in a casque,
Was tumbled from us under bare poles scudding;
And later hurricanes may claim more pawn...
For here between the two worlds, another, harsh,
This third, of water, tests the word; lo, here
Bewilderment and mutiny heap whelming
Laughter, and shadow cuts sleep from the heart
Almost as though the Moor's flung scimitar
Found more than flesh to fathom in its fall.
Yet under tempest-lash and surfeitings
Some inmost sob, half-heard, dissuades the abyss,
Merges the wind in measure to the waves,
Series on series, infinite, -- till eyes
Starved wide on blackened tides, accrete -- enclose
This turning rondure whole, this crescent ring
Sun-cusped and zoned with modulated fire
Like pearls that whisper through the Doge's hands
-- Yet no delirium of jewels! O Fernando,
Take of that eastern shore, this western sea,
Yet yield thy G-d's, thy Virgin's charity!
-- Rush down the plenitude, and you shall see
Isaiah counting famine on this lee!
An herb, a stray branch among salty teeth,
The jellied weeds that drag the shore, -- perhaps
Tomorrow's moon will grant us Saltes Bar --
Palos again, -- a land cleared of long war.
Some Angelus environs the cordage tree;
Dark waters onward shake the dark prow free.
O Thou who sleepest on Thyself, apart
Like ocean athwart lanes of death and birth,
And all the eddying breath between dost search
Cruelly with love thy parable of man, --
Inquisitor! incognizable Word
of Eden and the enchained Sepulchre,
Into thy steep savannahs, burning blue,
Utter to loneliness the sail is true.
Who grindest oar, and arguing the mast
Subscribest holocaust of ships, O Thou
Within whose primal scan consummately
The glistening seignories of Ganges swim; --
Who sendest greeting by the corposant,
And Teneriffe's garnet -- flamed it in a cloud,
Urging through night our passage to the Chan; --
Te Deum laudamus, for thy teeming span!
Of all that amplitude that time explores,
A needle in the sight, suspended north, --
Yielding by inference and discard, faith
And true appointment from the hidden shoal:
This disposition that thy night relates
From Moon to Saturn in one sapphire wheel:
The orbic wake of thy once whirling feet,
Elohim, still I hear thy sounding heel!
White toil of heaven's cordons, mustering
In holy rings all sails charged to the far
Hushed gleaming fields and pendant seething wheat
Of knowledge, -- round thy brows unhooded now
-- The kindled Crown! acceded of the poles
And biassed by full sails, meridians reel
Thy purpose -- still one shore beyond desire!
The sea's green crying towers a-sway, Beyond
And kingdoms
naked in the
trembling heart --
Te Deum laudamus
O Thou Hand of Fire
II
Powhatan's Daughter
"Pocahuntus, a well-featured but wanton yong girle ... of the age of
eleven or twelve years, get the boyes forth with her into the marke
place, and make them wheele, falling on their hands, turning their
heels upwards, whom she would followe, and wheele so herself, naked
as she was, all the fort over."
The Harbor Dawn
Insistently through sleep -- a tide of voices --
They meet you listening midway in your dream,
The long, tired sounds, fog-insulated noises:
gongs in white surplices, beshrouded wails,
Far strum of fog... horn signals dispersed in veils
And then a truck will lumber past the wharves
As winch engines begin throbbing on some deck;
Or a drunken stevedore's howl and thud below
Comes echoing alley-upward through dim snow.
And if they take your sleep away sometime
They give it back again. Soft sleeves of sound
Attend the darkling harbor, the pillowed bay;
Somewhere out there in blankness steam
Spills into steam, and wanders, washed away
-- Flurried by keen fifings, eddied
Among distant chiming buoys -- adrift. The sky,
Cool featherly fold, suspends, distills
This wavering slumber ... Slowly --
Immemorially the window, the half-covered chair,
Ask nothing but this sheath of pallid air.
And you beside me, blessed now while sirens
Sing to us, stealthily weave us into day --
Serenely now, before day claims our eyes
Your cool arms murmurously about me lay.
While myriad snowy hands are clustering at the panes --
your hands within my hands are deeds;
my tongue upon your throat -- singing
arms close; eyes wide, undoubtful
dark
drink the dawn --
a forest shudders in your hair!
The window goes blond slowly. Frostily clears.
From Cyclopean towers across Manhattan waters
-- Two -- three bright window-eyes aglitter, disk
The sun, released -- aloft with cold gulls hither.
The fog leans one last moment on the sill.
Under the mistletoe of dreams, a star --
As though to join us at some distant hill --
Turns in the waking west and goes to sleep.
Van Winkle
Macadam, gun-grey as the tunny's belt,
Leaps from Far Rockaway to Golden Gate:
Listen! the miles a hurdy-gurdy grinds --
Down gold arpeggios mile on mile unwinds
Times earlier, when you hurried off to school
-- It is the same hour though a later day --
You walked with Pizarro in a copybook,
And Cortez rode up, reining tautly in --
Firmly as coffee grips the taste, -- and away!
There was Priscilla's cheek close in the wind,
And Captain Smith, all beard and certainty,
And Rip Van Winkle bowing by the way, --
Is this Sleepy Hollow, friend -- ? And he --
And Rip forgot the office hours,
and he forgot the pay;
Van Winkle sweeps a tenement
way down on Avenue A, --
The grind-organ says... Remember, remember
The cinder pile at the end of the backyard
Where we stoned the family of young
Garter snakes under... And the monoplanes
We launched -- with paper wings and twisted
Rubber bands... Recall -- recall
the rapid tongues
That flittered from under the ash heap day
After day whenever your stick discovered
Some sunning inch of unsuspecting fibre --
It flashed back at your thrust, as clean as fire.
And Rip was slowly made aware
that he, Van Winkle, was not here
nor there. He woke and swore he'd seen Broadway
a Catskill daisy chain in May --
So memory, that strikes a rhyme out of a box
Or splits a random smell of flowers through glass --
Is it the whip stripped from the lilac tree
One day in spring my father took to me,
Or is it the Sabbatical, unconscious smile
My mother almost brought me once from church
And once only, as I recall -- ?
It flickered through the snow screen, blindly
It forsook her at the doorway, it was gone
Before I had left the window. It
Did not return with the kiss in the hall.
Macadam, gun-grey as the tunny's belt,
Leaps from Far Rockaway to Golden Gate...
Keep hold of that nickel for car-change, Rip,--
Have you got your "Times" -- ?
And hurry along, Van Winkle -- it's getting late!
The River
Stick your patent name on a signboard
brother -- all over -- going west -- young man
Tintex -- Japalac -- Certain-teed Overalls ads
and lands sakes! under the new playbill ripped
in the guaranteed corner -- see Bert Williams what?
Minstrels when you steal a chicken just
save me the wing for if it isn't
Erie it ain't for miles around a
Mazda -- and the telegraphic night coming on Thomas
a Ediford -- and whistling down the tracks
a headlight rushing with the sound -- can you
imagine -- while an EXpress makes time like
SCIENCE -- COMMERCE and the HOLYGHOST
RADIO ROARS IN EVERY HOME WE HAVE THE NORTHPOLE
WALLSTREET AND VIRGINBIRTH WITHOUT STONES OR
WIRES OR EVEN RUNning brooks connecting ears
and no sermons windows flashing roar
Breathtaking -- as you like it... eh?
So the 20th Century -- so
whizzed the Limited -- roared by and left
three men, still hungry on the tracks, ploddingly
watching the tail lights wizen and converge, slip-
ping gimleted and neatly out of sight.
The last bear, shot drinking in the Dakotas
Loped under wires that span the mountain stream.
Keen instruments, strung to a vast precision.
Bind town to town and dream to ticking dream.
But some men take their liquor slow -- and count
-- Though they'll confess no rosary nor clue --
The river's minute by the far brook's year.
Under a world of whistles, wires and steam
Caboose-like they go ruminating through
Ohio, Indiana -- blind baggage --
To Cheyenne tagging... Maybe Kalamazoo.
Time's rendings, time's blendings they construe
As final reckonings of fire and snow;
Strange bird-wit, like the elemental gist
Of unwalled winds they offer, singing low
My Old Kentucky Home and Casey Jones,
Some Sunny Day, I heard a road-gang chanting so.
And afterwards, who had a colt's eyes -- one said,
"Jesus! Oh I remember watermelon days!" And sped
High in a cloud of merriment, recalled
"-- And when my Aunt Sally Simpson smiled," he drawled --
"It was almost Louisiana, long ago."
"There's no place like Booneville though, Buddy,"
One said, excising a last burr from his vest,
"-- For early trouting." Then peering, in the can,
"-- But I kept on the tracks." Possessed, resigned,
He trod the fire down pensively and grinned,
Spreading dry shingles of a beard...
Behind
My father's cannery works I used to see
Rail-squatters ranged in nomad raillery,
The ancient men -- wifeless or runaway
Hobo-trekkers that forever search
An empire wilderness of freight and rails.
Each seemed a child, like me, on a loose perch,
Holding to childhood like some termless play.
John, Jake or Charley, hopping the slow freight
-- Memphis to Tallahassee -- riding the rods,
Blind fists of nothing, humpty-dumpty clods.
Yet they touch something like a key perhaps,
From pole to pole across the hills, the states
-- They know a body under the wide rain;
Youngsters with eyes like fjords, old reprobates,
With racetrack jargon, -- dotting immensity,
They lurk across her, knowing her yonder breast
Snow-silvered, sumac-stained or smoky blue --
Is past the valley-sleepers, south or west.
-- As I have trod the rumorous midnights, too,
And past the circuit of the lamp's thin flame
(O Nights that brought me to her body bare!)
Have dreamed beyond the print that bound her name.
Trains sounding the long blizzards out -- I heard
Wail into distances I knew were hers.
Papooses crying on the wind's long mane
Screamed redskin dynasties that fled the brain,
-- Dead echoes! But I knew her body there,
Time like a serpent down her shoulder, dark,
And space, an eaglet's wing, laid on her hair.
Under the Ozarks, domed by Iron Mountain,
The old G-ds of the rain lie wrapped in pools
Where eyeless fish curvet a sunken fountain
And re-descend with corn from querulous crows.
Such pilferings make up their timeless eatage,
Propitiate them for their timber torn
By iron, iron -- always the iron dealt cleavage!
They doze now, below axe and powder horn.
And Pullman breakfasters glide glistening steel
From tunnel into field -- iron strides the dew --
Straddles the hill, a dance of wheel on wheel.
You have a half-hour's wait at Siskiyou,
Or stay the night and take the next train through.
Southward, near Cairo passing, you can see
The Ohio merging, -- borne down Tennessee;
And if it's summer and the sun's in dusk
Maybe the breeze will lift the River's musk
As though the waters breathed that you might know
Memphis Johnny, Steamboat Bill, Missouri Joe.
Oh, lean from the window, if the train slows down,
As though you touched hands with some ancient clown,
-- A little while gaze absently below
And hum Deep River with them while they go.
Yes, turn again and sniff once more -- look see,
O Sheriff, Brakeman and Authority --
Hitch up your pants and crunch another quid,
For you, too, feed the River timelessly.
And few evade full measure of their fate;
Always they smile out eerily what they seem.
I could believe he joked at heaven's gate --
Dan Midland -- jolted from the cold brake-beam.
Down, down -- born pioneers in time's despite,
Grimed tributaries to an ancient flow --
They win no frontier by their wayward plight,
But drift in stillness, as from Jordan's brow.
You will not hear it as the sea; even stone
Is not more hushed by gravity... But slow,
As loth to take more tribute -- sliding prone
Like one whose eyes were buried long ago
The River, spreading, flows -- and spends your dream.
What are you, lost within this tideless spell?
You are your father's father, and the stream --
A liquid theme that floating n-----s swell.
Damp tonnage and alluvial march of days --
Nights turbid, vascular with silted shale
And roots surrendered down of moraine clays:
The Mississippi drinks the farthest dale.
O quarrying passion, undertowed sunlight!
The basalt surface drags a jungle grace
Ochreous and lynx-barred in lengthening might;
Patience! and you shall reach the biding place!
Over De Soto's bones the freighted floors
Throb past the City storied of three thrones.
Down two more turns the Mississippi pours
(Anon tall ironsides up from salt lagoons)
And flows within itself, heaps itself free.
All fades but one thin skyline 'round... Ahead
No embrace opens but the stinging sea;
The River lifts itself from its long bed,
Poised wholly on its dream, a mustard glow
Tortured with history, its one will -- flow!
-- The Passion spreads in wide tongues, choked and slow,
Meeting the Gulf, hosannas silently below.
The Dance
The swift red flesh, a winter king --
Who squired the glacier woman down the sky?
She ran the neighing canyons all the spring;
She spouted arms; she rose with maize -- to die.
And in the autumn drouth, whose burnished hands
With mineral wariness found out the stone
Where prayers, forgotten, streamed the mesa sands?
He holds the twilight's dim, perpetual throne.
Mythical brows we saw retiring -- loth,
Disturbed and destined, into denser green.
Greeting they sped us, on the arrow's oath:
Now lie incorrigibily what years between...
There was a bed of leaves, and broken play;
There was a veil upon you, Pocahontas, bride --
O Princess whose brown lap was virgin May;
And bridal flanks and eyes hid tawny pride.
I left the village for dogwood. By the canoe
Tugging below the mill-race, I could see
Your hair's keen crescent running, and the blue
First moth of evening take wing stealthily.
What laughing chains the water wove and threw!
I learned to catch the trout's moon whisper; I
Drifted how many hours I never knew,
But, watching, saw that fleet young crescent die
And one star, swinging, take its place, alone,
Cupped in the larches of the mountain pass --
Until, immortally, it bled into the dawn.
I left my sleek boat nibbling margin grass ...
I took the portage climb, then chose
A further valley-shed; I could not stop.
Feet nozzled wat'ry webs of upper flows;
One white veil gusted from the very top.
O Appalachian Spring! I gained the ledge;
Steep, inaccessible smile that eastward bends
And northward reaches in that violet wedge
Of Adirondacks! -- wisped of azure wands,
Over how many bluffs, tarns, streams I sped!
-- And knew myself within some boding shade: --
Grey tepees tufting the blue knolls ahead,
Smoke swirling through the yellow chestnut glade
A distant cloud, a thunder-bud -- it grew,
That blanket of the skies: the padded foot
Within, -- I heard it; 'til its rhythm drew,
-- Siphoned the black pool from the heart's hot root!
A cyclone threshes in the turbine crest,
Swooping in eagle feathers down your back;
Know, Maquokeeta, greeting; know death's best;
-- Fall, Sachem, strictly as the tamarack!
A birch kneels. All her whistling fingers fly.
The oak grove circles in a crash of leaves;
The long moan of a dance is in the sky.
Dance, Maquokeeta: Pocahontas grieves...
And every tendon scurries toward the twangs
Of lightning deltaed down your saber hair.
Now snaps the flint in every tooth; red fangs
And splay tongues thinly busy the blue air...
Dance, Maquokeeta! snake that lives before,
That casts his pelt, and lives beyond! Sprout, horn!
Spark, tooth! Medicine-man, relent, restore --
Lie to us, -- dance us back the tribal morn!
Spears and assemblies: black drums thrusting on --
O yelling battlements, -- I, too, was liege
To rainbows currying each pulsant bone:
Surpassed the circumstances, danced out the siege!
And buzzard-circleted, screamed from the stake;
I could not pick the arrows from my side.
Wrapped in that fire, I saw more escorts wake --
Flickering, sprint up the hill groins like a tide.
I heard the hush of lava wrestling your arms,
And stag teeth foam about the raven throat;
Flame cataracts of heaven in seething swarms
Fed down your anklets to the sunset's moat.
O, like the lizard in the furious noon,
that drops his legs and colors in the sun,
-- And laughs, pure serpent, Time itself, and moon
Of his own fate, I saw thy change begun!
And saw thee dive to kiss that destiny
Like one white meteor, sacrosant and blent
At last with all that's consummate and free
There, where the first and last G-ds keep thy tent.
Thewed of the levin, thunder-shod and lean,
Lo, through what infinite seasons dost thou gaze --
Across what bivouacs of thin angered slain,
And see'st thy bride immortal in the maze!
Totem and fire-gall, slumbering pyramid --
Though other calendars now stack the sky,
Thy freedom is her largesse, Prince, and hid
On paths thou knewest best to claim her by.
High unto Labrador the sun strikes free
Her speechless dream of snow, and stirred again,
She is the torrent and the singing tree;
And she is virgin to the last of men...
West, west and south! winds over Cumberland
And winds across the llano grass resume
Her hair's warm sibilance. Her breasts are fanned
O stream by slope and vineyard -- into bloom!
And when the caribou slant down for salt
Do arrows thirst and leap? Do antlers shine
Alert, star-triggered in the listening vault
Of dusk? -- And are her perfect brows to thine?
We danced, O Brave, we danced beyond their farms,
In cobalt desert closures made our vows...
Now is the strong prayer folded in thine arms,
The serpent with the eagle in the boughs.
Indiana
The morning-glory, climbing the morning long
Over the lintel on its wiry vine,
Closes before the dusk, furls in its song
As I close mine...
And bison thunder rends my dreams no more
As once my womb was torn, my boy, when you
Yielded your first cry at the prairie's door...
Your father knew
Then, though we'd buried him behind us, far
Back on the gold trail -- then his lost bones stirred...
But you who drop the scythe to grasp the oar
Knew not, nor heard.
How we, too, Prodigal, once rode off, too --
Waved Seminary Hill a gay good-bye...
We found G-d lavish there in Colorado
But passing sly.
The pebbles sang, the firecat slunk away
And glistening through the sluggard freshets came
In golden syllables loosed from the clay
His gleaming name.
A dream called Eldorado was his town,
It rose up shambling in the nuggets' wake,
It had no charter but a promised crown
Of claims to stake.
But we, -- too late, too early, howsoever --
Won nothing out of fifty-nine -- those years --
But gilded promise, yielded to us never,
And barren tears...
The long trail back! I huddled in the shade
Of wagon-tenting looked out once and saw
Bent westward, passing on a stumbling jade
A homeless squaw --
Perhaps a halfbreed. On her slender back
She cradled a babe's body, riding without rein.
Her eyes, strange for an Indian's, were not black
But sharp with pain
And like twin stars. They seemed to shun the gaze
Of all our silent men -- the long team line --
Until she saw me -- when their violet haze
Lit with love shine...
I held you up -- I suddenly the bolder,
Knew that mere words could not have brought us nearer.
She nodded -- and that smile across her shoulder
Will still endear her
As long as Jim, your father's memory, is warm.
Yes, Larry, now you're going to sea, remember
You were the first -- before Ned and his farm, --
First-born, remember --
And since then -- all that's left to me of Jim
Whose folks, like mine, came out of Arrowhead.
And you're the only one with eyes like him --
Kentucky bred!
I'm standing still, I'm old, I'm half of stone!
Oh, hold me in those eyes' engaging blue;
There's where the stubborn years gleam and atone, --
Where gold is true!
Down the dim turnpike to the river's edge --
Perhaps I'll hear the mare's hoofs to the ford...
Write me from Rio...and you'll keep your pledge;
I know your word!
Come back to Indiana -- not too late!
(Or will you be a ranger to the end?)
Good-bye...Good-bye...oh, I shall always wait
You, Larry, traveller --
stranger,
son,
-- my friend --
III
Cutty Sark
O, the navies old and oaken,
O, the Temeraire no more!
-Melville
I met a man in South Street, tall --
a nervous shark tooth swung on his chain.
His eyes pressed through green glass
-- green glasses, or bar lights made them
so --
shine --
GREEN --
eyes --
stepped out -- forgot to look at you
or left you several blocks away --
in the nickel-in-the-slot piano jogged
Stamboul Nights -- weaving somebody's nickel --
sang --
"O Stamboul Rose" -- dreams weave the rose!
Murmurs of Leviathan he spoke,
and rum was Plato in our heads...
"It's S.S. Ala -- Antwerp -- now remember kid
to put me out at three she sails on time.
I'm not much good at time any more keep
weakeyed watches sometimes snooze --" his bony hands
got to beating time... "A whaler once --
I ought to keep time and get over it -- I'm a
Democrat -- I know what time it is -- No
I don't want to know what time it is -- that
damned white Arctic killed my time..."
O Stamboul Rose -- drums weave --
"I ran a donkey engine down there on the Canal
in Panama -- got tired of that --
Then Yucatan selling kitchenware -- beads --
have you seen Popocatepetl -- birdless mouth
with ashes sifting down -- ?
and then the coast again..."
Rose of Stamboul O coral Queen --
teased remnants of the skeletons of cities --
and galleries, galleries of watergutted lava
snarling stone -- green -- drums -- drown --
Sing!
"-- that spiracle!" he shot a finger out the door
"O life's a geyser -- beautiful -- my lungs --
No -- I can't live on land --!"
I saw the frontiers gleaming of his mind;
or are there frontiers -- running sands sometimes
running sands -- somewhere -- sands running...
Or they may start some white machine that sings.
Then you may laugh and dance the axletree --
steel -- silver -- kick the traces -- and know --
ATLANTIS ROSE drums wreathe the rose,
the star floats burning in a gulf of tears
and sleep another thousand --
interminably
long since somebody's nickel -- stopped --
playing
A wind worried those wicker-neat lapels, the
swinging summer entrances to cooler hells...
Outside a wharf truck nearly ran him down
-- he lunged up Bowery way while the dawn
was putting the Statue of Liberty out -- that
torch of hers you know --
I started walking home across the Bridge...
Blithe Yankee vanities, turreted sprites, winged
British repartees, skil-
ful savage sea-girls
that bloomed in the spring -- Heave, weave
those bright designs the trade winds drive...
Sweet opium and tea, Yo-ho!
Pennies for porpoises that bank the keel!
Fins whip the breeze around Japan!
Bright skysails ticketing the Line, wink round the Horn
to Frisco, Melbourne...
Pennants, parabolas --
clipper dreams indelible and ranging,
baronial white on lucky blue!
Perennial-Cutty-trophied-Sark!
Thermopylae, Black Prince, Flying Cloud through Sunda
-- scarfed of foam, their bellies veered green esplanades,
locked in wind-humors, ran their eastings down;
at Java Head freshened the nip
(sweet opium and tea!)
and turned and left us on the lee...
Buntlines tusseling (91 days, 20 hours and anchored!)
Rainbow, Leander
(last trip a tragedy) -- where can you be
Nimbus? and you rivals two --
a long tack keeping --
Taeping?
Ariel?
Cape Hateras
The seas all crossed,
weathered the capes, the voyage done
-Walt Whitman
Imponderable the dinosaur
sinks slow,
the mammoth saurian
ghoul, the eastern
Cape ...
While rises in the west the coastwise range,
slowly the hushed land --
Combustion at the astral core -- the dorsal change
Of energy -- convulsive shift of sand...
But we, who round the capes, the promontories
Where strange tongues vary messages of surf
Below grey citadels, repeating to the stars
The ancient names -- return home to our own
Hearths, there to eat an apple and recall
The songs that gypsies dealt us at Marseille
Or how the priests walked -- slowly through Bombay
Or to read you, Walt, -- knowing us in thrall
To that deep wonderment, our native clay
Whose depth of red, eternal flesh of Pocahontas --
Those continental folded aeons, surcharged
With sweetness below derricks, chimneys, tunnels --
Is veined by all that time has really pledged us...
And from above, thin squeaks of radio static,
The captured fume of space foams in our ears --
What whisperings of far watches on the main
Relapsing into silence, while time clears
Our lenses, lifts a focus, resurrects
A periscope to glimpse what joys or pain
Our eyes can share or answer -- then deflects
Us, shunting to a labyrinth submersed
Where each sees only his dim past reversed...
But that star-glistered salver of infinity,
The circle, blind crucible of endless space,
Is sluiced by motion, -- subjugated never.
Adam and Adam's answer in the forest
Left Hesperus mirrored in the lucid pool.
Now the eagle dominates our days, is jurist
Of the ambiguous cloud. We know the strident rule
Of wings imperious...Space, instantaneous,
Flickers a moment, consumes us in its smile:
A flash over the horizon -- shifting tears.
Dream cancels dream in this new realm of fact
From which we wake into a dream of act;
Seeing himself an atom in a shroud --
Man hears himself an engine in a cloud!
"Recorders ages hence" -- ah, syllables of faith!
Walt, tell me, Walt Whitman, if infinity
Be still the same as when you walked the beach
Near Paumanok -- your lone patrol -- and heard the wraith
Through surf, its bird note there a long time falling...
For you, the panoramas and this breed of towers,
Of you -- the theme that's statured in the cliff.
O Saunterer on free ways still ahead!
Not this our empire yet, but labyrinth
Wherein your eyes, like the Great Navigator's without ship,
Gleam from the great stones of each prison crypt
Of canyoned traffic... Confronting the Exchange,
Surviving in a world of stocks, -- they also range
Across the hills where second timber strays
Back over Connecticut farms, abandoned pastures, --
Sea eyes and tidal, undenying, bright with myth!
The nasal whine of power whips a new universe...
Where spouting pillars spoor the evening sky,
Under the looming stacks of gigantic power house
Stars prick the eyes with sharp ammoniac proverbs,
New verities, new inklings in the velvet hummed
Of dynamos, where hearing's leash is strummed...
Power's script, -- wound, bobbin-bound, refined --
Is stropped to the slap of belts on booming spools, spurred
Into the bulging bouillon, harnessed jelly of the stars.
Toward what? The forked crash of split thunder parts
Our hearing momentwise; but fast in the whirling armatures,
As bright as frogs' eyes, giggling in the girth
Of steely gizzards -- axle-bound, confined
In coiled precision, bunched in mutual glee
The bearings glint, -- O murmurless and shined
In oilrinsed circles of blind ecstasy!
Stars scribble on our eyes the frosty sagas,
The gleaming cantos of unvanquished space...
O sinewy silver biplane, nudging the wind's withers!
There, from Kill Devils Hill at Kitty Hawk
Two brothers in their twinship left the dune;
Warping the gale, the Wright windwrestlers veered
Capeward then blading the wind's flank banked and spun
What ciphers risen from prophetic script,
What marathons new-set between the stars!
The soul, by naphtha fledged into new reaches,
Already knows the closer clasp of Mars, --
New latitudes, unknotting, soon give place
To what fierce schedules, rife of doom apace!
Behold the dragon's covey -- amphibian, ubiquitous
To hedge the seaboard, wrap the headland, ride
The blue's cloud-templed districts unto ether...
While Iliads glimmer through eyes raised in pride
Hell's belt springs wider into heaven's plumed side.
O bright circumferences, heights employed to fly
War's fiery kennel masked in downy offings, --
This tournament of space, the threshed and chiselled height,
Is baited by marauding circles, bludgeon flail
Of rancorous grenades whose screaming petals carve us
Wounds that we wrap with theorems sharp as hail!
Wheeled swiftly, wings emerge from larval-silver hangars.
Taut motors surge, space-gnawing, into flight;
Through sparkling visibility, outspread, unsleeping,
Wings clip the last peripheries of light...
Tellurian wind-sleuths on dawn patrol,
Each plane a hurtling javeline of winged ordnance,
Bristle the heights above a screeching gale to hover;
Surely no eye that Sunward Escadrille can cover!
There, meaningful, fledged as the Pleiades
With razor sheen they zoom each rapid helix!
Up-chartered choristers of their own speeding
They, cavalcade on escapade, shear Cumulus --
Lay siege and hurdle Cirrus down the skies!
While Cetus-like, O thou Dirigible, enormous Lounger
Of pendulous auroral beaches, -- satellited wide
By convoy planes, moonferrets that rejoin thee
On fleeing balconies as thou dost glide,
-- Hast splintered space!
Low, shadowed of the Cape,
Regard the moving turrets! From grey decks
See scouting griffons rise through gaseous crepe
Hung low... until a conch of thunder answers
Cloud-belfries, banging, while searchlights, like fencers,
Slit the sky's pancreas of foaming anthracite
Toward thee, O Corsair of the typhoon, pilot, hear
Thine eyes bicarbonated white by speed, O Skygak, see
How from thy path above the levin's lance
Thou sowest doom thou hast nor time nor chance
To reckon -- as thy stilly eyes partake
What alcohol of space...! Remember, Falcon-Ace,
Thou hast there in thy wrist a Sanskrit charge
To conjugate infinity's dim marge --
Anew...!
But first, here at this height receive
The benediction of the shell's deep, sure reprieve!
Lead-perforated fuselage, escutcheoned wings
Lift agonized quittance, tilting from the invisible brink
Now eagle-bright, now
quarry-hid, twist-
-ing, sink with
Enormous repercussive list-
-ings down
Giddily spiralled
gauntlets, upturned, unlooping
In guerrilla sleights, trapped in combustion gyr-
Ing, dance the curdled depth
down whizzing
Zodiacs, dashed
(now nearing fast the Cape!)
down gravitation's
vortex into crashed
...dispersion... into mashed and shapeless debris
By Hatteras bunched the beached heap of high bravery!
The stars have grooved our eyes with old persuasions
Of love and hatred, birth, -- surcease of nations...
But who has held the heights more sure than thou,
O Walt! -- Ascensions of thee hover in me now
As thou at junctions elegiac, there, of speed
With vast eternity, dost wield the rebound seed!
The competent loam, the probable grass, -- travail
Of tides awash the pedestal of Everest, fail
Not less than thou in pure impulse inbred
To answer deepest soundings! O, upward from the dead
Thou bringest tally, and a pact, new bound,
Of living brotherhood!
Thou, there beyond --
Glacial sierras and the flight of ravens,
Hermetically past condor zones, through zenith havens
Past where the albatross has offered up
His last wing-pulse, and downcast as a cup
That's drained, is shivered back to earth thy wand
Has beat a song, O Walt, -- there and beyond!
And this, thine other hand, upon my heart
Is plummet ushered of those tears that start
What memories of vigils, bloody, by that Cape,--
Ghoul-mound of man's perversity at balk
And fraternal massacre! Thou, pallid there as chalk
Hast kept of wounds, O Mourner, all that sum
That then from Appomattox stretched to Somme!
Cowslip and shad-blow, flaked like tethered foam
Around bared teeth of stallions, bloomed that spring
When first I read thy lines, rife as the loam
Of prairies, yet like breakers cliffward leaping!
O, early following thee, I searched the hill
Blue-writ and odor-firm with violets, 'til
With June the mountain laurel broke through green
And filled the forest with what clustrous sheen!
Potomac lilies, -- then the Pontiac rose,
And Klondike edelweiss of occult snows!
White banks of moonlight came descending valleys --
How speechful on oak-vizored palisades,
As vibrantly I following down Sequoia alleys
Heard thunder's eloquence through green arcades
Set trumpets breathing in each clump and grass tuft -- 'til
Gold autumn, captured, crowned the trembling hill!
Panis Angelicus! Eyes tranquil with the blaze
Of love's own diametric gaze, of love's amaze!
Not greatest, thou, not first, nor last, but near
And onward yielding past my utmost year.
Familiar, thou, as mendicants in public places;
Evasive -- too -- as dayspring's spreading arc to trace is:
Our Meistersinger, thou set breath in steel;
And it was thou who on the boldest heel
Stood up and flung the span on even wing
Of that great Bridge, our Myth, whereof I sing!
Years of the Modern! Propulsions toward what capes?
But thou, Panis Angelicus, hast thou not seen
And passed that Barrier that none escapes --
But knows it leastwise as death-strife? -- O, something green,
Beyond all sesames of science was thy choice
Wherewith to bind us throbbing with one voice,
New integers of Roman, Viking, Celt --
Thou, Vedic Ceasar, to the greensward knelt!
And now, as launched in abysmal cupolas of space,
Toward endless terminals, Easters of speeding light --
Vast engines outward veering with seraphic grace
On clarion cylinders pass out of sight
To course that span of consciousness thou'st named
The Open Road -- thy vision is reclaimed!
What heritage thou'st signalled to our hands!
And see! the rainbow's arch -- how shimmeringly stands
Above the Cape's ghoul-mound, O joyous seer!
Recorders ages hence, yes, they shall hear
In their own veins uncancelled thy sure tread
And read thee by the aureole 'round thy head
Of pasture-shine, Panis Angelicus!
Yes, Walt,
Afoot again, and onward without halt, --
Not soon, nor suddenly, -- No, never to let go
My hand
in yours,
Walt Whitman --
so --
Three Songs
The one Sestos, the other Abydos hight.
-Marlow
Southern Cross
I wanted you, nameless Woman of the South,
No wraith, but utterly -- as still more alone
The Southern Cross takes night
And lifts her girdles from her, one by one --
High, cool,
wide from the slowly smoldering fire
Of lower heavens, --
vaporous scars!
Eve! Magdalene!
or Mary, you?
Whatever call -- falls vainly on the wave.
O simian Venus, homeless Eve,
Unwedded, stumbling gardenless to grieve
Windswept guitars on lonely decks forever;
Finally to answer all within one grave!
And this long wake of phosphor,
iridescent
Furrow of all our travel -- trailed derision!
Eyes crumble at its kiss. Its long-dawn spell
Incites a yell. Slid on that backward vision
The mind is churned to spittle, whispering hell.
I wanted you... The embers of the Cross
Climbed by aslant and huddling aromatically.
It is blood to remember; it is fire
To stammer back... It is
G-d -- your namelessness. And the wash --
All night the water combed you with black
Insolence. You crept out simmering, accomplished.
Water rattled that stinging coil, your
Rehearsed hair -- docile, alas, from many arms.
Yes, Eve -- wraith of my unloved seed!
The Cross -- a phantom buckled dropped below the dawn.
Light drowned the lithic trillions of your spawn.
National Winter Garden
Outspoken buttocks in pink beads
Invite the necessary cloudy clinch
Of bandy eyes... No extra mufflings here:
The world's one flagrant, sweating cinch.
And white legs waken salads in the brain
You pick your blonde out neatly through the smoke.
Always you wait for someone else though, always --
(Then rush the nearest exit through the smoke).
Always and last, before the final ring
When all the fireworks blare, begins
A tom-tom scrimmage with a somewhere violin,
Some cheapest echo of them all -- begins.
And shall we call her whiter than the snow?
Sprayed first with ruby, then with emerald sheen --
Least tearful and least glad (who knows her smile?)
A caught slide shows her sandstone grey between.
Her eyes exist in swivellings of her teats,
Pearls whip her hips, a drench of whirling strands.
Her silly snake rings begin to mount, surmount
Each other -- turquoise fakes on tinselled hands.
We wait that writhing pool, her pearls collapsed,
-- All but her belly buried in the floor;
And the lewd trounce of a final muted beat!
We flee her spasm through a fleshless door...
Yet, to the empty trapeze of your flesh,
O Magdalene, each comes back to die alone.
Then you, the burlesque of our lust -- and faith,
Lug us back lifeward -- bone by infant bone.
Virginia
O rain at seven,
Pay-check at eleven --
Keep smiling the boss away,
Mary (what are you going to do?)
Gone seven -- gone eleven,
And I'm still waiting you --
O blue-eyed Mary with the claret scarf,
Saturday Mary, mine!
It's high carillon
From the popcorn bells!
Pigeons by the million --
And Spring in Prince Street
Where green figs gleam
By oyster shells!
O Mary, leaning from the high wheat tower,
Let down your golden hair!
High in the noon of May
On cornices of daffodils
The slender violets stray.
Crap-shooting gangs in Bleecker reign,
Peonies with pony manes --
Forget-me-nots at windowpanes:
Out of the way-up nickel-dime tower shine,
Cathedral Mary,
shine! --
VI
Quaker Hill
I see only the ideal. But no ideals
have ever been fully suc-
cessful on this earth
-Isadora Duncan
The gentian weaves her fringes,
the maple's loom is red.
-Emily Dickinson
Perspective never withers from their eyes;
They keep that docile edict of the Spring
That blends March with August Antarctic skies:
These are but cows that see no other thing
Than grass and snow, and their own inner being
Through the rich halo that they do not trouble
Even to cast upon the seasons fleeting
Though they should thin and die on last year's stubble.
And they are awkward, ponderous and uncoy...
While we who press the cider mill, regarding them
We, who with pledges taste the bright annoy
Of friendship's acid wine, retarding phlegm,
Shifting reprisals ('til who shall tell us when
The jest is too sharp to be kindly?) boast
Much of our store of faith in other men
Who would ourselves, stalk down the merriest ghost.
Above them old Mizzentop, palatial white
Hostelry -- floor by floor to cinquefoil dormer
Portholes the ceilings stack their stoic height.
Long tiers of windows staring out toward former
Faces -- loose panes crown the hill and gleam
At sunset with a silent, cobwebbed patience...
See them, like eyes that still uphold some dream
Through mapled vistas, cancelled reservations!
High from the central cupola, they say
One's glance could cross the borders of three states;
But I have seen death's stare in slow survey
From four horizons that no one relates...
Weekenders avid of their turf-won scores,
Here three hours from the semaphores, the Czars
Of golf, by twos and threes in placid plusfours
Alight with sticks abristle and cigars.
This was the Promised Land, and still it is
To the persuasive suburban land agent
In bootleg roadhouses where the gin fizz
Bubbles in time to Hollywood's new love-nest pageant.
Fresh from the radio in the old Meeting House
(Now the Avalon Hotel) volcanoes roar
A welcome to highsteppers that no mouse
Who saw the Friends there ever heard before.
What cunning neighbors history has in fine!
The woodlouse mortgages the ancient deal
Table that Powitzky buys for only nine-
Ty-five at Adams' auctions, -- eats the seal,
The spinster polish of antiquity...
Who holds the lease on time and on disgrace?
What eats the pattern with ubiquity?
Where are my kinsmen and the patriarch race?
The resigned factions of the dead preside.
Dead rangers bled their comfort on the snow;
But I must ask slain Iroquois to guide
Me farther than scalped Yankees knew to go:
Shoulder the curse of sundered parentage,
Wait for the postman driving from Birch Hill
With birthright by blackmail, the arrant page
That unfolds a new destiny to fill...
So, must we from the hawk's far stemming view,
Must we descend as worm's eye to construe
Our love of all we touch, and take it to the Gate
As humbly as a guest who knows himself too late,
His news already told? Yes, while the heart is wrung,
Arise -- yes take this sheaf of dust upon your tongue!
In one last angelus lift throbbing throat --
Listen, transmuting silence with that silly note
Of pain that Emily, that Isadora knew!
While high from dim elm-chancels hung with dew,
That triple-noted clause of moonlight --
Yes, whip-poor-will, unhusks the heart of fright,
Breaks us and saves, yes, breaks the heart, yet yields
That patience that is armour and that shields
Love from despair -- when love foresees the end --
Leaf after autumnal leaf
break off,
descend --
descend --
The Tunnel
To Find the Western path
right thro' the Gates of Wrath
-William Blake
Performances, assortments, résumés --
Up Times Square to Columbus Circle lights
Channel the congresses, nightly sessions,
Refractions of the thousand theatres, faces --
Mysterious kitchens... you shall search them all.
Some day by heart you'll learn each famous sight
And watch the curtain lift in hell's despite;
You'll find the garden in the third act dead,
Finger your knees -- and wish yourself in bed
With tabloid crime-sheets perched in easy sight.
Then let you reach your hat
and go.
As usual, let you -- also
walking down -- exclaim
to twelve upward leaving
a subscription praise
for what time slays.
Or can't you quite make up your mind to ride;
A walk is better underneath the L a brisk
Ten blocks or so before? But you find yourself
Preparing penguin flexions of the arms, --
As usual you will meet the scuttle yawn:
The subway yawns the quickest promise home.
Be minimum, then, to swim the hiving swarms
Out of the Square, the Circle burning bright --
Avoid the glass doors gyring at your right,
Where boxed alone a second, eyes take fright
-- Quite unprepared rush naked back to light:
And down beside the turnstile press the coin
Into the slot. The gongs already rattle.
And so
of cities you bespeak
subways, rivered under streets
and rivers... In the car
the overtone of motion
underground, the monotone
of motion is the sound
of other faces, also underground --
"Let's have a pencil Jimmy -- living now
at Floral Park
Flatbush -- on the Fourth of July --
like a pigeon's muddy dream -- potatoes
to dig in the field -- travlin the town -- too --
night after night -- the Culver line -- the
girls all shaping up -- it used to be --"
Our tongues recant like beaten weather vanes.
This answer lives like verdigris, like hair
Beyond extinction, surcease of the bone;
And repetition freezes -- "What
"what do you want? getting weak on the links?
fandaddle daddy don't ask for change -- IS THIS
FOURTEENTH? it's half past six she said -- if
you don't like my gate why did you
swing on it, why didja
swing on it
anyhow -- "
And somehow anyhow swing --
The phonographs of hades in the brain
Are tunnels that re-wind themselves, and love
A burnt match skating in a urinal --
Somewhere above Fourteenth TAKE THE EXPRESS
To brush some new presentiment of pain --
"But I want service in this office SERVICE
I said -- after
the show she cried a little afterwards but --"
Whose head is swinging from the swollen strap?
Whose body smokes along the bitten rails,
Bursts from a smoldering bundle far behind
In back forks of the chasms of the brain, --
Puffs from a riven stump far out behind
In interborough fissures of the mind...?
And why do I often meet your visage here,
Your eyes like agate lanterns -- on and on
Below the toothpaste and the dandruff ads?
-- And did their riding eyes right through your side,
And did their eyes like unwashed platters ride?
And Death, aloft, -- gigantically down
Probing through you -- toward me, O evermore!
And when they dragged your retching flesh,
Your trembling hands that night through Baltimore
That last night on the ballot rounds, did you
Shaking, did you deny the ticket, Poe?
For Gravesand Manor change at Chambers Street.
The platform hurries along to a dead stop.
The intent escalator lifts a serenade
Stilly
Of shoes, umbrellas, each eye attending its shoe, then
Bolting outright somewhere above where streets
Burst suddenly in rain... The gongs recur:
Elbows and levers, guard and hissing door.
Thunder is galvothermic here below... The car
Wheels off. The train rounds, bending to a scream,
Taking the final level for the dive
Under the river --
And somewhat emptier than before,
Demented, for a hitching second, humps; then
Let's go... Toward corners of the floor
Newspapers wing, revolve and wing.
Blank windows gargle signals through the roar.
And does the Daemon take you home, also,
Wop washerwoman, with the bandaged hair?
After the corridors are swept, the cuspidors --
The gaunt sky-barracks cleanly now, and bare,
O Genoese, do you bring mother eyes and hands
Back home to children and to golden hair?
Daemon, demurring and eventful yawn!
Whose hideous laughter is a bellows mirth
-- Or the muffled slaughter of a day in birth --
O cruelly to inoculate the brinking dawn
With antennae toward worlds that glow and sink; --
To spoon us out more liquid than the dim
Locution of the eldest star, and pack
The conscience navelled in the plunging wind,
Umbilical to call -- and straightaway die!
O caught like pennies beneath soot and steam,
Kiss of our agony thou gatherest;
Condensed, thou takest all -- shrill ganglia
Impassioned with some song we fail to keep.
And yet, like Lazarus, to feel the slope,
The sod and billow breaking, -- lifting ground,
-- A sound of waters bending astride the sky
Unceasing with some Word that will not die...!
A tugboat, wheezing wreaths of steam,
Lunged past, with one galvanic blare stove up the River.
I counted the echoes assembling, one after one,
Searching, thumbing the midnight on the piers.
Lights, coasting, left the oily tympanum of waters;
The blackness somewhere gouged glass on a sky.
And this thy harbor, O my City, I have driven under,
Tossed from the coil of ticking towers... Tomorrow,
And to be... Here the River that is East --
Here at the water's edge the hands drop memory;
Shadowless in that abyss they unaccounting lie.
How far away the star has pooled the sea --
Or shall the hands be drawn away, to die?
Kiss of our agony Thou gatherest,
O Hand of Fire
gatherest --
VIII
Atlantis
Music is then the knowledge of that which
relates to love in harmony and system
-Plato
Through the bound cable strands, the arching path
Upward, veering with light, the flight of strings,
Taut miles of shuttling moonlight syncopate
The whispered rush, telepathy of wires.
Up the index of night, granite and steel --
Transparent meshes -- fleckless the gleaming staves --
Sibylline voices flicker, waveringly stream
As though a G-d were issue of the strings...
And through that cordage, threading with its call
One arc synoptic of all tides below --
Their labyrinthine mouths of history
Pouring reply as though all ships at sea
Complighted in one vibrant breath made cry, --
Make thy love sure -- to weave whose song we ply!
From black embankments, moveless soundings hailed,
so seven oceans answer from their dream.
And on, obliquely up bright carrier bars
New octaves trestle the twin monolyths
Beyond whose frosted capes the moon bequeaths
Two worlds of sleep (O arching strands of song!) --
Onward and up the crystal-flooded aisle
White tempest nets file upward, upward ring
With silver terraces the humming spars,
The loft of vision, palladium helm of stars.
Sheerly the eyes, like seagulls stung with rime --
Slit and propelled by glistening fins of light --
Pick biting way up towering looms that press
Sidelong with flight of blade on tendon blade
-- Tomorrows into yesteryear -- and link
What cipher-script of time no traveller reads
But who, through smoking pyres of love and death,
Searches the timeless laugh of mythic spears.
Like hails, farewells -- up planet-sequined heights
Some trillion whispering hammers glimmer Tyre:
Serenely, sharply up the long anvil cry
Of inchling aeons silence rivets Troy.
And you, aloft there -- Jason! hesting Shout!
Still wrapping harness to the swarming air!
Silvery the rushing wake, surpassing call,
Beams yelling Aeolus! splintered in the straits!
From gulfs unfolding, terrible of drums,
Tall Vision-of-the-Voyage, tensely spare --
Bridge, lifting night to cycloramic crest
Of deepest day -- O Choir, translating time
Into what multitudinous Verb the suns
And synergy of waters ever fuse, recast
In myriad syllables, -- Psalm of Cathay!
O Love, thy white, pervasive Paradigm...!
We left the haven hanging in the night --
Sheened harbor lanterns backward fled the keel.
Pacific here at time's end, bearing corn, --
Eyes stammer through the pangs of dust and steel.
And still the circular, indubitable frieze
Of heaven's meditation, yoking wave
To kneeling wave, one song devoutly binds --
The vernal strophe chimes from deathless strings!
O Thou steeled Cognizance whose leap commits
The agile precincts of the lark's return;
Within whose lariat sweep encinctured sing
In single chrysalis the many twain, --
Of stars Thou art the stitch and stallion glow
And like an organ, Thou, with sound of doom, --
Sight, sound, and flesh Thou leadest from time's realm
As love strikes clear direction for the helm.
Swift peal of secular light, intrinsic Myth
Whose fell unshadow is death's utter wound, --
O River-throated -- iridescently upborne
Through the bright drench and fabric of our veins;
With white escarpments swinging into light,
Sustained in tears the cities are endowed
And justified conclamant with ripe fields
Revolving through their harvests in sweet torment.
Forever Deity's glittering Pledge, O Thou
Whose canticle fresh chemistry assigns
To rapt inception and beatitude, --
Always through blinding cables, to our joy,
Of thy white seizure springs the prophecy:
Always through spring cordage, pyramids
Of silver sequel, Deity's young name
Kinetic of white choiring wings... ascends.
Migrations that must needs void memory,
Inventions that cobblestone the heart, --
Unspeakable Thou Bridge to Thee, O Love.
Thy pardon for this history, whitest Flower,
O Answerer of all, -- Anemone. --
Now while thy petals spend the suns about us, hold --
(O Thou whose radiance doth inherit me)
Atlantis, -- hold thy floating singer late!
So to thine Everpresence, beyond time,
Like spears ensanguined of one tolling star
That bleeds infinity -- the orphic strings,
Sideral phalanxes, leap and converge:
-- One Song, one Bridge of Fire! Is it Cathay,
Now pity steeps the grass and rainbows ring
The serpent with the eagle in the leaves...?
Whispers antiphonal in azure swing.
Columbus,
alone, gazing
toward Spain,
invokes the
presence of
two faithful
partisans of
his quest...
400 years and
more ... or is
it from the
soundless shore
of sleep
that time
recalls you to
your love,
there in a
waking dream
to merge
your seed
-- with whom?
Who is the
woman with
us in the dawn?...
whose is the
flesh our feet
have moved upon?
Streets spread
past store and
factory -- sped
by sunlight
and her
smile...
Like Memory,
she is time's
truant, shall
take you by
the hand...
...and past
the din and
slogans of
the year --
to those
whose addresses
are never near
but who have
touched her,
knowing her
without name
nor the
myths of her
fathers...
Then you shall
see her truly
-- your blood
remembering
its first
invasion of her
secrecy, its
first encounters with her
kin, her chieftain
lover... his shade
that haunts the
lakes and hills
...and read
her in a
mother's
farewell gaze.
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