Collecte Works (4 page)

Transition

Colours of October

wait with easy dignity

for the big change—

like gorgeous quill-pens

in old inkwells

almost dry.

Mourning Dove

The sound of a mourning dove

slows the dawn

there is a dee round silence

in the sound.

Or it may be I face the dull prospect

of an imagist

turned philosopher

SPIRALS

Promise of Brilliant Funeral

Travel, said he of the broken umbrella, enervates

the point of stop; once indoors, theology,

for want of a longer telescope, is made

of the moon-woman passing amid silk

nerve-thoughts in the blood.

(There's trouble with the moon-maker's union,

the blood-maker's union, the thought-maker's union;

but the play could be altered.)

A man strolls pale among zinnias,

life and satin sleeves renounced.

He is intent no longer on what direction herons fly

in hell, but on computing space in forty minutes,

and ascertains at the end of the path:

this going without tea holds a hope of tasting it.

(Chalk-faces going down in rows before a stage

have seen no action yet.)

Mr. Brown visits home.

His broker by telephone advises him it's night

and a plum falls on a marshmallow

and sight comes to owls.

He risks three rooms noisily for the brightest sconce.

Rome was never like this.

(The playwright dies in the draft

when ghosts laugh.)

When Ecstasy is Inconvenient

Feign a great calm;

all gay transport soon ends.

Chant: who knows—

flight's end or flight's beginning

for the resting gull?

Heart, be still.

Say there is money but it rusted;

say the time of moon is not right for escape.

It's the color in the lower sky

too broadly suffused,

or the wind in my tie.

Know amazedly how

often one takes his madness

into his own hands

and keeps it.

PROGRESSION

I

Here's good health, friends,

and soothing syrup for sleeplessness

and Lincoln said he thought a good deal

in an abstract way

about a steam plow;

secure and transcendental, Emerson avowed

that money is a spiritual force;

the Big Shot of Gangland declared he never really believed

in wanton murder;

Shelley, Shelley, off on the new romance

wrote inconsolable Harriet,

“Are you above the world?

And to what extent?”

And it's the Almanac-Maker joyous

when the prisoner-lad asked the pastor

“Who is Americus Vespucius?”

and an artist labored over the middle tone

that carried the light

into the shadow.

But that was before the library burned.

II

As one Somnambulist to another

our sleep could be more perfect.

Surmising planed squares of wood with legs are tables,

or poppies watched and brooded over flare finally

out of bud-shell hatched

is admitting such superstitions only wait

to beset us outright.

III

Home is on the land

though drought be solid fact,

though you tell by the summer sky

how you'll pare your potatoes next winter;

you murmur your magic (what help is the past?):

opera is an oversight

on the part of the Milky Way

and the squash blossom subsides

with the Fourth Internationale

and it's obviously not theatre.

But what can you do that yellowing season of earth

with more than nine hundred ninety

recombinations of yellows

since rain crossed the modes

of your brooding?

IV

Last lines being sentimental, reaction

is in the first of the cold. The contemporary scene is,

said the green frog by the charcoal wood, false

in every particular but no less admirable for that,

and isn't it humorous to designate at all?

I take into my hole, said he, the curse

that hangs over more than one critic, this

that if forgiven tassels are lost.

Well, and the sun does set short in winter….

What's the play? The sensitive lawyer would have told

any woman her hands were as beautiful as if gloved

but for fear of having been quoted.

At the Capitol, cheese legislation only sets silk hats

tipping, rats divine, toward feline waistbands.

At home, it's blizzard or a curved banana-moon

on a window sash, soap flakes on wash day

and door knobs wet; hornets' nests in tobacco pipes.

I must possess myself, get back into pure duration,

or I should like to be an orator and rise

to my full height, or now that roads are closed

stop quietly in print the one available weather:

how the head hums, men of Ireland, and it goes

the next log on the hearth from violins to harlequins

to modern women and violins again, and the last

determination coincides with the first, and so then

summer has not been since the bliss and doll's house lady

and all that waxing of the lily and sweet care

of people on the stem…. I remember a garden:

exigential, or violet, I've forgotten, but delphinium

with suspect of turquoise, formulosos deterred

at the start from interval form by trick of eye

or soul or sun and since by whom…you

swinging your cape too far to the left, the effect

is blue, not periwinkle; you triumphant over cauliflower

polonaise; you full of principles; and you crying

crush infamy when you should be shaking hands

with the Cardinal. The most public-cant-and-cabbage-

interruption comes, however, from circles where

the farm question is discussed,—a white dome logic

no wayside strabismic house, rafters owling out

the night would recognize; no talk there, none,

of why there's nothing like a good warm cow

when the wind's in the west.

V

It comes out in March by the back fence, the full

and true Relation of the present State of new country

and the coming of the world green. Some believed

she was immune from such a Thing being they had adopted

a youngster in dispare, most persons, you find,

peck and peck and seldom really lay any eggs, red

though suns set for windy to-morrows. Spring looms also

in phonographic deep song on a level with the water

and in spoken acknowledgment of carved humidor

so calm what is this woman a man should say: woman.

Complaints differ: trees have their roots in China;

it was tried there three thousand years ago and failed.

April a silver symbol is of rain and universal love;

April ergo lost integral if not grey gone. New

reviews use the dusking nounal (how do you die, thrush,

this afternoon) with a lamp and aluminum forecast

(light gets mooned in a clouded river, and frogs

are out scouring, one ratchet ahead of cracked piccolos).

My dear May: I should like to buy myself flowers,

arrive at the door and give them to you. May, again,

I believe to have seen in my best swooning moments,

but I might easily have been prejudiced by a slow heart

or what the porcelain painter said in that nerve-ray

or by the Slumbrous my shadow spoke, going by. This swale

can only be the mode by which we condense all exposition

to a green blood-beat and bleach intact. Let no man say

from grass to grass he never to himself has sunk

is the first tremble of an old vibration orioled

at dandelion heat. In Swalery I forget my face,

beyond that it's something to have under a sunbonnet

when aphorists and haymakers meet. And doctor,

nothing so good I know for intricate rhyme schemes

in six-syllable lines within ten-syllable lines

of an evangelical staple as bug-sing and carrot seed,

observe now, while perspective is the next show

in the gallery, it's a fervid shade, and there'll be

stricken areas in the throat waiting for the blowing.

A touch of noon? Try then: each man to his own sleep

in the night skies. Gaspaciousness enmillions

dread-centric introspectres. Future studies

will throw much darkness on the home-talk.

VI

Meanwhile surviving burial and the garden with too many

tall stones entails backroads, berries and what is socialism.

If I had two pigs, said the farmer, and you hadn't any,

I'd have to give you one, and the gardener said, fist

to mahogany, no more petals would fall from the silver vased

red poppy than enough. Meanwhile coming in the afternoon,

one wakes about the beaches long-summering. A girl's hair

lies in a neat droll along the back of the neck, a man

can't rest unless he's tired; another eats between dinner

and tea to stimulate the circulation, this class of ideas

brown bodied, pistoned and cogged and nowhere dissembled.

To retire to the wood out of glaring might mean freedom

from the blue pressure of my fellow magnetoes, and nothing

less to lift: plants from the habits of their whorls

than a storm passage in the strings, the brass being silent

for many bars. I should say the social behavior of the individual

should be thoroughly rained on, and in the same rheumatism

the Introspect's Umbrella Mender waved good-bye. Of course,

I shall meet people here, my antecedents perhaps. But how

shall I know them? If I am fernal, it's fern country, then;

fern fever has been spread by mono-men I shall pass in the air