Of summer. Tomorrow will look like today,

Will appear like it. But it will be an appearance,

A shape left behind, with like wings spreading out,

Brightly empowered with like colors, swarmingly,

But not quite molten, not quite the fluid thing,

A little changed by tips of artifice, changed

By the glints of sound from the grass. These are not

The early constellations, from which came the first

Illustrious intimations—uncertain love,

The knowledge of being, sense without sense of time.

Take the diamonds from your hair and lay them down.

The deer-grass is thin. The timothy is brown.

The shadow of an external world comes near.

Man Carrying Thing

The poem must resist the intelligence

Almost successfully. Illustration:

A brune figure in winter evening resists

Identity. The thing he carries resists

The most necessitous sense. Accept them, then,

As secondary (parts not quite perceived

Of the obvious whole, uncertain particles

Of the certain solid, the primary free from doubt,

Things floating like the first hundred flakes of snow

Out of a storm we must endure all night,

Out of a storm of secondary things),

A horror of thoughts that suddenly are real.

We must endure our thoughts all night, until

The bright obvious stands motionless in cold.

Men Made out of Words

What should we be without the sexual myth,

The human revery or poem of death?

Castratos of moon-mash—Life consists

Of propositions about life. The human

Revery is a solitude in which

We compose these propositions, torn by dreams,

By the terrible incantations of defeats

And by the fear that defeats and dreams are one.

The whole race is a poet that writes down

The eccentric propositions of its fate.

A Woman Sings a Song for a Soldier Come Home

The wound kills that does not bleed.

It has no nurse nor kin to know

Nor kin to care.

And the man dies that does not fall.

He walks and dies. Nothing survives

Except what was,

Under the white clouds piled and piled

Like gathered-up forgetfulness,

In sleeping air.

The clouds are over the village, the town,

To which the walker speaks

And tells of his wound,

Without a word to the people, unless

One person should come by chance,

This man or that,

So much a part of the place, so little

A person he knows, with whom he might

Talk of the weather—

And let it go, with nothing lost,

Just out of the village, at its edge,

In the quiet there.

The Good Man Has No Shape

Through centuries he lived in poverty.

God only was his only elegance.

Then generation by generation he grew

Stronger and freer, a little better off.

He lived each life because, if it was bad,

He said a good life would be possible.

At last the good life came, good sleep, bright fruit,

And Lazarus betrayed him to the rest,

Who killed him, sticking feathers in his flesh

To mock him. They placed with him in his grave

Sour wine to warn him, an empty book to read;