Part 2

Tossed on these horns, who bleeding dies, Lacks all but piteous admissions to be spilt Upon the page whose blind sum finally burns Record of rage and partial appetites. The pure possession, the inclusive cloud Whose heart is fire shall come,--the white wind rase All but bright stones wherein our smiling plays.

LACHRYMAE CHRISTI

Whitely, while benzine Rinsings from the moon Dissolve all but the windows of the mills (Inside the sure machinery Is still And curdled only where a sill Sluices its one unyielding smile)

Immaculate venom binds The fox’s teeth, and swart Thorns freshen on the year’s First blood. From flanks unfended, Twanged red perfidies of spring Are trillion on the hill.

And the nights opening Chant pyramids,-- Anoint with innocence,--recall To music and retrieve what perjuries Had galvanized the eyes.

While chime Beneath and all around Distilling clemencies,--worms’ Inaudible whistle, tunneling Not penitence But song, as these Perpetual fountains, vines,--

Thy Nazarene and tinder eyes.

(Let sphinxes from the ripe Borage of death have cleared my tongue Once and again; vermin and rod No longer bind. Some sentient cloud Of tears flocks through the tendoned loam: Betrayed stones slowly speak.)

Names peeling from Thine eyes And their undimming lattices of flame, Spell out in palm and pain Compulsion of the year, O Nazarene.

Lean long from sable, slender boughs, Unstanched and luminous. And as the nights Strike from Thee perfect spheres, Lift up in lilac-emerald breath the grail Of earth again--

Thy face From charred and riven stakes, O Dionysus, Thy Unmangled target smile.

PASSAGE

Where the cedar leaf divides the sky I heard the sea. In sapphire arenas of the hills I was promised an improved infancy.

Sulking, sanctioning the sun, My memory I left in a ravine,-- Casual louse that tissues the buckwheat, Aprons rocks, congregates pears In moonlit bushels And wakens alleys with a hidden cough.

Dangerously the summer burned (I had joined the entrainments of the wind). The shadows of boulders lengthened my back: In the bronze gongs of my cheeks The rain dried without odour.

“It is not long, it is not long; See where the red and black Vine-stanchioned valleys--”: but the wind Died speaking through the ages that you know And hug, chimney-sooted heart of man! So was I turned about and back, much as your smoke Compiles a too well known biography.

The evening was a spear in the ravine That throve through very oak. And had I walked The dozen particular decimals of time? Touching an opening laurel, I found A thief beneath, my stolen book in hand.

“Why are you back here--smiling an iron coffin?” “To argue with the laurel,” I replied: “Am justified in transience, fleeing Under the constant wonder of your eyes--.”

He closed the book. And from the Ptolemies Sand troughed us in a glittering abyss. A serpent swam a vertex to the sun --On unpaced beaches leaned its tongue and drummed. What fountains did I hear? what icy speeches? Memory, committed to the page, had broke.

THE WINE MENAGERIE

Invariably when wine redeems the sight, Narrowing the mustard scansions of the eyes, A leopard ranging always in the brow Asserts a vision in the slumbering gaze.

Then glozening decanters that reflect the street Wear me in crescents on their bellies. Slow Applause flows into liquid cynosures: --I am conscripted to their shadows’ glow.

Against the imitation onyx wainscoting (Painted emulsion of snow, eggs, yarn, coal, manure) Regard the forceps of the smile that takes her. Percussive sweat is spreading to his hair. Mallets, Her eyes, unmake an instant of the world....

What is it in this heap the serpent pries-- Whose skin, facsimile of time, unskeins Octagon, sapphire transepts round the eyes; --From whom some whispered carillon assures Speed to the arrow into feathered skies?

Sharp to the windowpane guile drags a face, And as the alcove of her jealousy recedes An urchin who has left the snow Nudges a cannister across the bar While August meadows somewhere clasp his brow.

Each chamber, transept, coins some squint, Remorseless line, minting their separate wills-- Poor streaked bodies wreathing up and out, Unwitting the stigma that each turn repeals: Between black tusks the roses shine!

New thresholds, new anatomies! Wine talons Build freedom up about me and distill This competence--to travel in a tear Sparkling alone, within another’s will.

Until my blood dreams a receptive smile Wherein new purities are snared; where chimes Before some flame of gaunt repose a shell Tolled once, perhaps, by every tongue in hell. --Anguished, the wit that cries out of me:

“Alas,--these frozen billows of your skill! Invent new dominoes of love and bile ... Ruddy, the tooth implicit of the world Has followed you. Though in the end you know And count some dim inheritance of sand, How much yet meets the treason of the snow.

“Rise from the dates and crumbs. And walk away, Stepping over Holofernes’ shins-- Beyond the wall, whose severed head floats by With Baptist John’s. Their whispering begins.

“--And fold your exile on your back again; Petrushka’s valentine pivots on its pin.”

RECITATIVE

Regard the capture here, O Janus-faced, As double as the hands that twist this glass. Such eyes at search or rest you cannot see; Reciting pain or glee, how can you bear!

Twin shadowed halves: the breaking second holds In each the skin alone, and so it is I crust a plate of vibrant mercury Borne cleft to you, and brother in the half.

Inquire this much-exacting fragment smile, Its drums and darkest blowing leaves ignore,-- Defer though, revocation of the tears That yield attendance to one crucial sign.

Look steadily--how the wind feasts and spins The brain’s disk shivered against lust. Then watch While darkness, like an ape’s face, falls away, And gradually white buildings answer day.

Let the same nameless gulf beleaguer us-- Alike suspend us from atrocious sums Built floor by floor on shafts of steel that grant The plummet heart, like Absalom, no stream.

The highest tower,--let her ribs palisade Wrenched gold of Nineveh;--yet leave the tower. The bridge swings over salvage, beyond wharves; A wind abides the ensign of your will....

In alternating bells have you not heard All hours clapped dense into a single stride? Forgive me for an echo of these things, And let us walk through time with equal pride.

FOR THE MARRIAGE OF FAUSTUS AND HELEN

“_And so we may arrive by Talmud skill And profane Greek to raise the building up Of Helen’s house against the Ismaelite, King of Thogarma, and his habergeons Brimstony, blue and fiery; and the force Of King Abaddon, and the beast of Cittim; Which Rabbi David Kimchi, Onkelos, And Aben Ezra do interpret Rome._”

--THE ALCHEMIST.

I

The mind has shown itself at times Too much the baked and labeled dough Divided by accepted multitudes. Across the stacked partitions of the day-- Across the memoranda, baseball scores, The stenographic smiles and stock quotations Smutty wings flash out equivocations.

The mind is brushed by sparrow wings; Numbers, rebuffed by asphalt, crowd The margins of the day, accent the curbs, Convoying divers dawns on every corner To druggist, barber and tobacconist, Until the graduate opacities of evening Take them away as suddenly to somewhere Virginal perhaps, less fragmentary, cool.

_There is the world dimensional for those untwisted by the love of things irreconcilable._ ...

And yet, suppose some evening I forgot The fare and transfer, yet got by that way Without recall,--lost yet poised in traffic. Then I might find your eyes across an aisle, Still flickering with those prefigurations-- Prodigal, yet uncontested now, Half-riant before the jerky window frame.

There is some way, I think, to touch Those hands of yours that count the nights Stippled with pink and green advertisements. And now, before its arteries turn dark I would have you meet this bartered blood. Imminent in his dream, none better knows The white wafer cheek of love, or offers words Lightly as moonlight on the eaves meets snow.

Reflective conversion of all things At your deep blush, when ecstasies thread The limbs and belly, when rainbows spread Impinging on the throat and sides.... Inevitable, the body of the world Weeps in inventive dust for the hiatus That winks above it, bluet in your breasts.

The earth may glide diaphanous to death; But if I lift my arms it is to bend To you who turned away once, Helen, knowing The press of troubled hands, too alternate With steel and soil to hold you endlessly. I meet you, therefore, in that eventual flame You found in final chains, no captive then-- Beyond their million brittle, bloodshot eyes; White, through white cities passed on to assume That world which comes to each of us alone.

Accept a lone eye riveted to your plane, Bent axle of devotion along companion ways That beat, continuous, to hourless days-- One inconspicuous, glowing orb of praise.

II

Brazen hypnotics glitter here; Glee shifts from foot to foot, Magnetic to their tremulo. This crashing opera bouffe, Blest excursion! this ricochet From roof to roof-- Know, Olympians, we are breathless While nigger cupids scour the stars!

A thousand light shrugs balance us Through snarling hails of melody. White shadows slip across the floor Splayed like cards from a loose hand; Rhythmic ellipses lead into canters Until somewhere a rooster banters.

Greet naïvely--yet intrepidly New soothings, new amazements That cornets introduce at every turn-- And you may fall downstairs with me With perfect grace and equanimity. Or, plaintively scud past shores Where, by strange harmonic laws All relatives, serene and cool, Sit rocked in patent armchairs.

O, I have known metallic paradises Where cuckoos clucked to finches Above the deft catastrophes of drums. While titters hailed the groans of death Beneath gyrating awnings I have seen The incunabula of the divine grotesque. This music has a reassuring way.

The siren of the springs of guilty song-- Let us take her on the incandescent wax Striated with nuances, nervosities That we are heir to: she is still so young, We cannot frown upon her as she smiles, Dipping here in this cultivated storm Among slim skaters of the gardened skies.

III

Capped arbiter of beauty in this street That narrows darkly into motor dawn,-- You, here beside me, delicate ambassador Of intricate slain numbers that arise In whispers, naked of steel; religious gunman! Who faithfully, yourself, will fall too soon, And in other ways than as the wind settles On the sixteen thrifty bridges of the city: Let us unbind our throats of fear and pity.

We even, Who drove speediest destruction In corymbulous formations of mechanics,-- Who hurried the hill breezes, spouting malice Plangent over meadows, and looked down On rifts of torn and empty houses Like old women with teeth unjubilant That waited faintly, briefly and in vain:

We know, eternal gunman, our flesh remembers The tensile boughs, the nimble blue plateaus, The mounted, yielding cities of the air!

That saddled sky that shook down vertical Repeated play of fire--no hypogeum Of wave or rock was good against one hour. We did not ask for that, but have survived And will persist to speak again before All stubble streets that have not curved To memory, or known the ominous lifted arm That lowers down the arc of Helen’s brow To saturate with blessing and dismay.

A goose, tobacco and cologne-- Three winged and gold-shod prophecies of heaven, The lavish heart shall always have to leaven And spread with bells and voices, and atone The abating shadows of our conscript dust.

Anchises’ navel, dripping of the sea,-- The hands Erasmus dipped in gleaming tides, Gathered the voltage of blown blood and vine; Delve upward for the new and scattered wine, O brother-thief of time, that we recall. Laugh out the meager penance of their days Who dare not share with us the breath released, The substance drilled and spent beyond repair For golden, or the shadow of gold hair.

Distinctly praise the years, whose volatile Blamed bleeding hands extend and thresh the height The imagination spans beyond despair, Outpacing bargain, vocable and prayer.

AT MELVILLE’S TOMB

Often beneath the wave, wide from this ledge The dice of drowned men’s bones he saw bequeath An embassy. Their numbers as he watched, Beat on the dusty shore and were obscured.

And wrecks passed without sound of bells, The calyx of death’s bounty giving back A scattered chapter, livid hieroglyph, The portent wound in corridors of shells.

Then in the circuit calm of one vast coil, Its lashings charmed and malice reconciled, Frosted eyes there were that lifted altars; And silent answers crept across the stars.

Compass, quadrant and sextant contrive No farther tides.... High in the azure steeps Monody shall not wake the mariner. This fabulous shadow only the sea keeps.

VOYAGES

I

Above the fresh ruffles of the surf Bright striped urchins flay each other with sand. They have contrived a conquest for shell shucks, And their fingers crumble fragments of baked weed Gaily digging and scattering.

And in answer to their treble interjections The sun beats lightning on the waves, The waves fold thunder on the sand; And could they hear me I would tell them:

O brilliant kids, frisk with your dog, Fondle your shells and sticks, bleached By time and the elements; but there is a line You must not cross nor ever trust beyond it Spry cordage of your bodies to caresses Too lichen-faithful from too wide a breast. The bottom of the sea is cruel.

II

--And yet this great wink of eternity, Of rimless floods, unfettered leewardings, Samite sheeted and processioned where Her undinal vast belly moonward bends, Laughing the wrapt inflections of our love;

Take this Sea, whose diapason knells On scrolls of silver snowy sentences, The sceptred terror of whose sessions rends As her demeanors motion well or ill, All but the pieties of lovers’ hands.

And onward, as bells off San Salvador Salute the crocus lustres of the stars, In these poinsettia meadows of her tides,-- Adagios of islands, O my Prodigal, Complete the dark confessions her veins spell.

Mark how her turning shoulders wind the hours, And hasten while her penniless rich palms Pass superscription of bent foam and wave,-- Hasten, while they are true,--sleep, death, desire, Close round one instant in one floating flower.

Bind us in time, O Seasons clear, and awe. O minstrel galleons of Carib fire, Bequeath us to no earthly shore until Is answered in the vortex of our grave The seal’s wide spindrift gaze toward paradise.

III

Infinite consanguinity it bears-- This tendered theme of you that light Retrieves from sea plains where the sky Resigns a breast that every wave enthrones; While ribboned water lanes I wind Are laved and scattered with no stroke Wide from your side, whereto this hour The sea lifts, also, reliquary hands.

And so, admitted through black swollen gates That must arrest all distance otherwise,-- Past whirling pillars and lithe pediments, Light wrestling there incessantly with light, Star kissing star through wave on wave unto Your body rocking! and where death, if shed, Presumes no carnage, but this single change,-- Upon the steep floor flung from dawn to dawn The silken skilled transmemberment of song;

Permit me voyage, love, into your hands....

IV

Whose counted smile of hours and days, suppose I know as spectrum of the sea and pledge Vastly now parting gulf on gulf of wings Whose circles bridge, I know, (from palms to the severe Chilled albatross’s white immutability) No stream of greater love advancing now Than, singing, this mortality alone Through clay aflow immortally to you.

All fragrance irrefragibly, and claim Madly meeting logically in this hour And region that is ours to wreathe again, Portending eyes and lips and making told The chancel port and portion of our June--

Shall they not stem and close in our own steps Bright staves of flowers and quills to-day as I Must first be lost in fatal tides to tell?

In signature of the incarnate word The harbor shoulders to resign in mingling Mutual blood, transpiring as foreknown And widening noon within your breast for gathering All bright insinuations that my years have caught For islands where must lead inviolably Blue latitudes and levels of your eyes,--

In this expectant, still exclaim receive The secret oar and petals of all love.

V

Meticulous, past midnight in clear rime, Infrangible and lonely, smooth as though cast Together in one merciless white blade-- The bay estuaries fleck the hard sky limits.

--As if too brittle or too clear to touch! The cables of our sleep so swiftly filed, Already hang, shred ends from remembered stars. One frozen trackless smile.... What words Can strangle this deaf moonlight? For we

Are overtaken. Now no cry, no sword Can fasten or deflect this tidal wedge, Slow tyranny of moonlight, moonlight loved And changed.... “There’s

Nothing like this in the world,” you say, Knowing I cannot touch your hand and look Too, into that godless cleft of sky Where nothing turns but dead sands flashing.

“--And never to quite understand!” No, In all the argosy of your bright hair I dreamed Nothing so flagless as this piracy.

But now Draw in your head, alone and too tall here. Your eyes already in the slant of drifting foam; Your breath sealed by the ghosts I do not know: Draw in your head and sleep the long way home.

VI

Where icy and bright dungeons lift Of swimmers their lost morning eyes, And ocean rivers, churning, shift Green borders under stranger skies, Steadily as a shell secretes Its beating leagues of monotone, Or as many waters trough the sun’s Red kelson past the cape’s wet stone;

O rivers mingling toward the sky And harbor of the phœnix’ breast-- My eyes pressed black against the prow, --Thy derelict and blinded guest

Waiting, afire, what name, unspoke, I cannot claim: let thy waves rear More savage than the death of kings, Some splintered garland for the seer.

Beyond siroccos harvesting The solstice thunders, crept away, Like a cliff swinging or a sail Flung into April’s inmost day--

Creation’s blithe and petalled word To the lounged goddess when she rose Conceding dialogue with eyes That smile unsearchable repose--

Still fervid covenant, Belle Isle, --Unfolded floating dais before Which rainbows twine continual hair-- Belle Isle, white echo of the oar!

The imaged Word, it is, that holds Hushed willows anchored in its glow. It is the unbetrayable reply Whose accent no farewell can know.