This Solitude of Cataracts

He never felt twice the same about the flecked river,

Which kept flowing and never the same way twice, flowing

Through many places, as if it stood still in one,

Fixed like a lake on which the wild ducks fluttered,

Ruffling its common reflections, thought-like Monadnocks.

There seemed to be an apostrophe that was not spoken.

There was so much that was real that was not real at all.

He wanted to feel the same way over and over.

He wanted the river to go on flowing the same way,

To keep on flowing. He wanted to walk beside it,

Under the buttonwoods, beneath a moon nailed fast.

He wanted his heart to stop beating and his mind to rest

In a permanent realization, without any wild ducks

Or mountains that were not mountains, just to know how it would be,

Just to know how it would feel, released from destruction,

To be a bronze man breathing under archaic lapis,

Without the oscillations of planetary pass-pass,

Breathing his bronzen breath at the azury centre of time.

In a Bad Time

How mad would he have to be to say, “He beheld

An order and thereafter he belonged

To it”? He beheld the order of the northern sky.

But the beggar gazes on calamity

And thereafter he belongs to it, to bread

Hard found, and water tasting of misery.

For him cold’s glacial beauty is his fate.

Without understanding, he belongs to it

And the night, and midnight, and after, where it is.

What has he? What he has he has. But what?

It is not a question of captious repartee.

What has he that becomes his heart’s strong core?

He has his poverty and nothing more.

His poverty becomes his heart’s strong core—

A forgetfulness of summer at the pole.

Sordid Melpomene, why strut bare boards,

Without scenery or lights, in the theatre’s bricks,

Dressed high in heliotrope’s inconstant hue,

The muse of misery? Speak loftier lines.

Cry out, “I am the purple muse.” Make sure

The audience beholds you, not your gown.

Metaphor as Degeneration

If there is a man white as marble

Sits in a wood, in the greenest part,

Brooding sounds of the images of death,

So there is a man in black space

Sits in nothing that we know,

Brooding sounds of river noises;

And these images, these reverberations,

And others, make certain how being

Includes death and the imagination.

The marble man remains himself in space.

The man in the black wood descends unchanged.

It is certain that the river

Is not Swatara. The swarthy water

That flows round the earth and through the skies,

Twisting among the universal spaces,

Is not Swatara. It is being.

That is the flock-flecked river, the water,

The blown sheen—or is it air?

How, then, is metaphor degeneration,

When Swatara becomes this undulant river

And the river becomes the landless, waterless ocean?

Here the black violets grow down to its banks

And the memorial mosses hang their green