The father fetches negresses to dance,

Among the children, like curious ripenesses

Of pattern in the dance’s ripening.

For these the musicians make insidious tones,

Clawing the sing-song of their instruments.

The children laugh and jangle a tinny time.

The father fetches pageants out of air,

Scenes of the theatre, vistas and blocks of woods

And curtains like a naive pretence of sleep.

Among these the musicians strike the instinctive poem.

The father fetches his unherded herds,

Of barbarous tongue, slavered and panting halves

Of breath, obedient to his trumpet’s touch.

This then is Chatillon or as you please.

We stand in the tumult of a festival.

What festival? This loud, disordered mooch?

These hospitaliers? These brute-like guests?

These musicians dubbing at a tragedy,

A-dub, a-dub, which is made up of this:

That there are no lines to speak? There is no play.

Or, the persons act one merely by being here.

VI

It is a theatre floating through the clouds,

Itself a cloud, although of misted rock

And mountains running like water, wave on wave,

Through waves of light. It is of cloud transformed

To cloud transformed again, idly, the way

A season changes color to no end,

Except the lavishing of itself in change,

As light changes yellow into gold and gold

To its opal elements and fire’s delight,

Splashed wide-wise because it likes magnificence

And the solemn pleasures of magnificent space.

The cloud drifts idly through half-thought-of forms.

The theatre is filled with flying birds,

Wild wedges, as of a volcano’s smoke, palm-eyed

And vanishing, a web in a corridor

Or massive portico. A capitol,

It may be, is emerging or has just

Collapsed. The denouement has to be postponed …

This is nothing until in a single man contained,

Nothing until this named thing nameless is

And is destroyed. He opens the door of his house

On flames. The scholar of one candle sees

An Arctic effulgence flaring on the frame

Of everything he is. And he feels afraid.

VII

Is there an imagination that sits enthroned

As grim as it is benevolent, the just

And the unjust, which in the midst of summer stops

To imagine winter? When the leaves are dead,

Does it take its place in the north and enfold itself,

Goat-leaper, crystalled and luminous, sitting

In highest night? And do these heavens adorn

And proclaim it, the white creator of black, jetted

By extinguishings, even of planets as may be,

Even of earth, even of sight, in snow,

Except as needed by way of majesty,

In the sky, as crown and diamond cabala?

It leaps through us, through all our heavens leaps,

Extinguishing our planets, one by one,

Leaving, of where we were and looked, of where

We knew each other and of each other thought,

A shivering residue, chilled and foregone,

Except for that crown and mystical cabala.

But it dare not leap by chance in its own dark.

It must change from destiny to slight caprice.

And thus its jetted tragedy, its stele