Collected Earlier Poems (6 page)

                         Neither shall the flame

Kindle upon them, nor the fire burn

                         A hair of them, for they

Shall be thy care when it shall come to pass,

                         And calling on thy name

In the hot kilns and ovens, they shall turn

To thee as it is prophesied, and say,

“
He shall come down like rain upon mown grass
.”

                         I have been wondering

    What you are thinking about, and by now suppose

                         It is certainly not me.

    But the crocus is up, and the lark, and the blundering

                         Blood knows what it knows.

It talks to itself all night, like a sliding moonlit sea.

                         Of course, it is talking of you.

    At dawn, where the ocean has netted its catch of lights,

                         The sun plants one lithe foot

    On that spill of mirrors, but the blood goes worming through

                         Its warm Arabian nights,

Naming your pounding name again in the dark heart-root.

                         Who shall, of course, be nameless.

    Anyway, I should want you to know I have done my best,

                         As I’m sure you have, too.

    Others are bound to us, the gentle and blameless

                         Whose names are not confessed

In the ceaseless palaver. My dearest, the clear unquarried blue

                         Of those depths is all but blinding.

    You may remember that once you brought my boys

                         Two little woolly birds.

    Yesterday the older one asked for you upon finding

                         Your thrush among his toys.

And the tides welled about me, and I could find no words.

                         There is not much else to tell.

    One tries one’s best to continue as before,

                         Doing some little good.

    But I would have you know that all is not well

                         With a man dead set to ignore

The endless repetitions of his own murmurous blood.

“For me Almighty God Himself has died,”

Said one who formerly rebuked his pride

With, “Father, I am not worthy,” and here denied

The Mercy by which each of us is tried.

When, to a popular tune, God’s Mercy and Justice

                         Coagulate here again,

Establishing in tissue the True Republic

                         Of good looks to all men

And victuals and wit and the holy sloth of the lily,

                         Thou shalt not toil nor spin.

I saw in stalls of pearl the heavenly hosts,

Gentle as down, and without private parts.

“Dies Irae,” they sang, and I could smell

The dead-white phosphorus of sacred hearts.

The first man leaps the ditch. (Who wins this race

                         Wins laurel, but laurel dies.)

The next falls in (who in his hour of grace

                         Plucked out his offending eyes.)

The blind still lead. (Consider the ant’s ways;

                         Consider, and be wise.)

The penniless Indian fakirs and their camels

                         Slip through the needle’s eye

To bliss (for neither flesh nor spirit trammels

                         Such as are prone to die)

And from emaciate heaven they behold

                         Our sinful kings confer

Upon an infant huge tributes of gold

                         And frankincense and myrrh.

Let the poor look to themselves, for it is said

Their savior wouldn’t turn stones into bread.

And let the sow continually say grace.

For moss shall build in the lung and leave no trace,

The glutton worm shall tunnel in the head

And eat the Word out of the parchment face.

The Phoenix knows no lust, and Christ, our mother,

Suckles his children with his vintage blood.

Not to be such a One is to be other.

Down every passage of the cloister hung

A dark wood cross on a white plaster wall;

But in the court were roses, not as tongue

Might have them, something of Christ’s blood grown small,

But just as roses, and at three o’clock

Their essences, inseparably bouqueted,

Seemed more than Christ’s last breath, and rose to mock

An elderly man for whom the Sisters prayed.

What heart can know itself? The Sibyl speaks

Mirthless and unbedizened things, but who

Can fathom her intent? Loving the Greeks,

He whispered to a nun who strove to woo

His spirit unto God by prayer and fast,

“Pray that I go to Limbo, if it please

Heaven to let my soul regard at last

Democritus, Plato and Socrates.”

And so it was. The river, as foretold,

Ran darkly by; under his tongue he found

Coin for the passage; the ferry tossed and rolled;

The sages stood on their appointed ground,

Sighing, all as foretold. The mind was tasked;

He had not dreamed that so many had died.

“But where is Alcibiades,” he asked,

“The golden roisterer, the animal pride?”

Those sages who had spoken of the love

And enmity of things, how all things flow,

Stood in a light no life is witness of,

And Socrates, whose wisdom was to know

He did not know, spoke with a solemn mien,

And all his wonderful ugliness was lit,

“He whom I loved for what he might have been

Freezes with traitors in the ultimate pit.”

I suffer now continually from vertigo, and today, 23rd of January, 1862, I received a singular warning: I felt the wind of the wing of madness pass over me
.

BAUDELAIRE
,
Journals

It’s all very well to dream of a dove that saves,

               Picasso’s or the Pope’s,

The one that annually coos in Our Lady’s ear

               Half the world’s hopes,

And the other one that shall cunningly engineer

The retirement of all businessmen to their graves,

               And when this is brought about

Make us the loving brothers of every lout—