The scholar, captious, told him what he could

Of there, where the truth was not the respect of one,

But always of many things. He had not to be told

Of the incredible subjects of poetry.

He was willing they should remain incredible,

Because the incredible, also, had its truth,

Its tuft of emerald that is real, for all

Its invitation to false metaphor.

The incredible gave him a purpose to believe.

III

How thick this gobbet is with overlays,

The double fruit of boisterous epicures,

Like the same orange repeating on one tree

A single self. Divest reality

Of its propriety. Admit the shaft

Of that third planet to the table and then:

1. The hut stands by itself beneath the palms.

2. Out of their bottle the green genii come.

3. A vine has climbed the other side of the wall.

4. The sea is spouting upward out of rocks.

5. The symbol of feasts and of oblivion …

6. White sky, pink sun, trees on a distant peak.

7. These lozenges are nailed-up lattices.

8. The owl sits humped. It has a hundred eyes.

9. The cocoanut and cockerel in one.

10. This is how yesterday’s volcano looks.

11. There is an island Palahude by name —

12. An uncivil shape like a gigantic haw.

These casual exfoliations are

Of the tropic of resemblances, sprigs

Of Capricorn or as the sign demands,

Apposites, to the slightest edge, of the whole

Undescribed composition of the sugar-cone,

Shiftings of an inchoate crystal tableau,

The momentary footings of a climb

Up the pineapple, a table Alp and yet

An Alp, a purple Southern mountain bisqued

With the molten mixings of related things,

Cat’s taste possibly or possibly Danish lore,

The small luxuriations that portend

Universal delusions of universal grandeurs,

The slight incipiencies, of which the form,

At last, is the pineapple on the table or else

An object the sum of its complications, seen

And unseen. This is everybody’s world.

Here the total artifice reveals itself

As the total reality. Therefore it is

One says even of the odor of this fruit,

That steeps the room, quickly, then not at all,

It is more than the odor of this core of earth

And water. It is that which is distilled

In the prolific ellipses that we know,

In the planes that tilt hard revelations on

The eye, a geometric glitter, tiltings

As of sections collecting toward the greenest cone.

Of Ideal Time and Choice

Since thirty mornings are required to make

A day of which we say, this is the day

That we desired, a day of blank, blue wheels,

Involving the four corners of the sky,

Lapised and lacqued and freely emeraldine

In the space it fills, the silent motioner

There, of clear, revolving crystalline;

Since thirty summers are needed for a year

And thirty years, in the galaxies of birth,

Are time for counting and remembering,

And fill the earth with young men centuries old

And old men, who have chosen, and are cold