Of blue light and of green, as lesser poems,

And the miraculous multiplex of lesser poems,

Not merely into a whole, but a poem of

The whole, the essential compact of the parts,

The roundness that pulls tight the final ring

VIII

And that which in an altitude would soar,

A vis, a principle or, it may be,

The meditation of a principle,

Or else an inherent order active to be

Itself, a nature to its natives all

Beneficence, a repose, utmost repose,

The muscles of a magnet aptly felt,

A giant, on the horizon, glistening,

IX

And in bright excellence adorned, crested

With every prodigal, familiar fire,

And unfamiliar escapades: whirroos

And scintillant sizzlings such as children like,

Vested in the serious folds of majesty,

Moving around and behind, a following,

A source of trumpeting seraphs in the eye,

A source of pleasant outbursts on the ear.

X

It is a giant, always, that is evolved,

To be in scale, unless virtue cuts him, snips

Both size and solitude or thinks it does,

As in a signed photograph on a mantelpiece.

But the virtuoso never leaves his shape,

Still on the horizon elongates his cuts,

And still angelic and still plenteous,

Imposes power by the power of his form.

XI

Here, then, is an abstraction given head,

A giant on the horizon, given arms,

A massive body and long legs, stretched out,

A definition with an illustration, not

Too exactly labelled, a large among the smalls

Of it, a close, parental magnitude,

At the centre on the horizon, concentrum, grave

And prodigious person, patron of origins.

XII

That’s it. The lover writes, the believer hears,

The poet mumbles and the painter sees,

Each one, his fated eccentricity,

As a part, but part, but tenacious particle,

Of the skeleton of the ether, the total

Of letters, prophecies, perceptions, clods

Of color, the giant of nothingness, each one

And the giant ever changing, living in change.

Large Red Man Reading

There were ghosts that returned to earth to hear his phrases,

As he sat there reading, aloud, the great blue tabulae.

They were those from the wilderness of stars that had expected more.

There were those that returned to hear him read from the poem of life,

Of the pans above the stove, the pots on the table, the tulips among them.

They were those that would have wept to step barefoot into reality,

That would have wept and been happy, have shivered in the frost

And cried out to feel it again, have run fingers over leaves

And against the most coiled thorn, have seized on what was ugly

And laughed, as he sat there reading, from out of the purple tabulae,

The outlines of being and its expressings, the syllables of its law:

Poesis, poesis, the literal characters, the vatic lines,

Which in those ears and in those thin, those spended hearts,

Took on color, took on shape and the size of things as they are

And spoke the feeling for them, which was what they had lacked.