Who can move the German load

Or say to the French here is France again?

Imago. Imago. Imago.

It is nothing, no great thing, nor man

Of ten brilliancies of battered gold

And fortunate stone. It moves its parade

Of motions in the mind and heart,

A gorgeous fortitude. Medium man

In February hears the imagination’s hymns

And sees its images, its motions

And multitude of motions

And feels the imagination’s mercies,

In a season more than sun and south wind,

Something returning from a deeper quarter,

A glacier running through delirium,

Making this heavy rock a place,

Which is not of our lives composed …

Lightly and lightly, O my land,

Move lightly through the air again.

Saint John and the Back-Ache

The Back-Ache

The mind is the terriblest force in the world, father,

Because, in chief, it, only, can defend

Against itself. At its mercy, we depend

Upon it.

Saint John

The world is presence and not force.

Presence is not mind.

The Back-Ache

Presence is Kinder-Scenen.

Saint John

It fills the being before the mind can think.

The effect of the object is beyond the mind’s

Extremest pinch and, easily, as in

A sudden color on the sea. But it is not

That big-brushed green. Or in a tragic mode,

As at the moment of the year when, tick,

Autumn howls upon half-naked summer. But

It is not the unravelling of her yellow shift.

Presence is not the woman, come upon,

Not yet accustomed, yet, at sight, humane

To most incredible depths. I speak below

The tension of the lyre. My point is that

These illustrations are neither angels, no,

Nor brilliant blows thereof, ti-rill-a-roo,

Nor all one’s luck at once in a play of strings.

They help us face the dumbfoundering abyss

Between us and the object, external cause,

The little ignorance that is everything,

The possible nest in the invisible tree,

Which in a composite season, now unknown,

Denied, dismissed, may hold a serpent, loud

In our captious hymns, erect and sinuous,

Whose venom and whose wisdom will be one.

Then the stale turtle will grow limp from age.

We shall be heavy with the knowledge of that day.

The Back-Ache

It may be, may be. It is possible.

Presence lies far too deep, for me to know

Its irrational reaction, as from pain.

Puella Parvula

Every thread of summer is at last unwoven.

By one caterpillar is great Africa devoured

And Gibraltar is dissolved like spit in the wind.

But over the wind, over the legends of its roaring,

The elephant on the roof and its elephantine blaring,

The bloody lion in the yard at night or ready to spring

From the clouds in the midst of trembling trees

Making a great gnashing, over the water wallows

Of a vacant sea declaiming with wide throat,

Over all these the mighty imagination triumphs

Like a trumpet and says, in this season of memory,

When the leaves fall like things mournful of the past,

Keep quiet in the heart, O wild bitch. O mind