Without a rider on a road at night.

The mind sits listening and hears it pass.

It is someone walking rapidly in the street.

The reader by the window has finished his book

And tells the hour by the lateness of the sounds.

Even breathing is the beating of time, in kind:

A retardation of its battering,

A horse grotesquely taut, a walker like

A shadow in mid-earth … If we propose

A large-sculptured, platonic person, free from time,

And imagine for him the speech he cannot speak,

A form, then, protected from the battering, may

Mature: A capable being may replace

Dark horse and walker walking rapidly.

Felicity, ah! Time is the hooded enemy,

The inimical music, the enchantered space

In which the enchanted preludes have their place.

II

Description of a Platonic Person

Then came Brazil to nourish the emaciated

Romantic with dreams of her avoirdupois, green glade

Of serpents like z rivers simmering,

Green glade and holiday hotel and world

Of the future, in which the memory had gone

From everything, flying the flag of the nude,

The flag of the nude above the holiday hotel.

But there was one invalid in that green glade

And beneath that handkerchief drapeau, severe,

Signal, a character out of solitude,

Who was what people had been and still were,

Who lay in bed on the west wall of the sea,

Ill of a question like a malady,

Ill of a constant question in his thought,

Unhappy about the sense of happiness.

Was it that—a sense and beyond intelligence?

Could the future rest on a sense and be beyond

Intelligence? On what does the present rest?

This platonic person discovered a soul in the world

And studied it in his holiday hotel.

He was a Jew from Europe or might have been.

III

Fire-Monsters in the Milky Brain

Man, that is not born of woman but of air,

That comes here in the solar chariot,

Like rhetoric in a narration of the eye—

We knew one parent must have been divine,

Adam of beau regard, from fat Elysia,

Whose mind malformed this morning metaphor,

While all the leaves leaked gold. His mind made morning,

As he slept. He woke in a metaphor: this was

A metamorphosis of paradise,

Malformed, the world was paradise malformed …

Now, closely the ear attends the varying

Of this precarious music, the change of key

Not quite detected at the moment of change

And, now, it attends the difficult difference.

To say the solar chariot is junk

Is not a variation but an end.

Yet to speak of the whole world as metaphor

Is still to stick to the contents of the mind

And the desire to believe in a metaphor.

It is to stick to the nicer knowledge of

Belief, that what it believes in is not true.

IV

Dry Birds Are Fluttering in Blue Leaves—

It is never the thing but the version of the thing:

The fragrance of the woman not her self,