Gone wild, be what he tells you to be: Puella.

Write pax across the window pane. And then

Be still. The summarium in excelsis begins …

Flame, sound, fury composed … Hear what he says,

The dauntless master, as he starts the human tale.

An Ordinary Evening in New Haven

I

The eye’s plain version is a thing apart,

The vulgate of experience. Of this,

A few words, an and yet, and yet, and yet—

As part of the never-ending meditation,

Part of the question that is a giant himself:

Of what is this house composed if not of the sun,

These houses, these difficult objects, dilapidate

Appearances of what appearances,

Words, lines, not meanings, not communications,

Dark things without a double, after all,

Unless a second giant kills the first—

A recent imagining of reality,

Much like a new resemblance of the sun,

Down-pouring, up-springing and inevitable,

A larger poem for a larger audience,

As if the crude collops came together as one,

A mythological form, a festival sphere,

A great bosom, beard and being, alive with age.

II

Suppose these houses are composed of ourselves,

So that they become an impalpable town, full of

Impalpable bells, transparencies of sound,

Sounding in transparent dwellings of the self,

Impalpable habitations that seem to move

In the movement of the colors of the mind,

The far-fire flowing and the dim-coned bells

Coming together in a sense in which we are poised,

Without regard to time or where we are,

In the perpetual reference, object

Of the perpetual meditation, point

Of the enduring, visionary love,

Obscure, in colors whether of the sun

Or mind, uncertain in the clearest bells,

The spirit’s speeches, the indefinite,

Confused illuminations and sonorities,

So much ourselves, we cannot tell apart

The idea and the bearer-being of the idea.

III

The point of vision and desire are the same.

It is to the hero of midnight that we pray

On a hill of stones to make beau mont thereof.

If it is misery that infuriates our love,

If the black of night stands glistening on beau mont,

Then, ancientest saint ablaze with ancientest truth,

Say next to holiness is the will thereto,

And next to love is the desire for love,

The desire for its celestial ease in the heart.

Which nothing can frustrate, that most secure,

Unlike love in possession of that which was

To be possessed and is. But this cannot

Possess. It is desire, set deep in the eye,

Behind all actual seeing, in the actual scene,

In the street, in a room, on a carpet or a wall,

Always in emptiness that would be filled,

In denial that cannot contain its blood,

A porcelain, as yet in the bats thereof.

IV

The plainness of plain things is savagery,

As: the last plainness of a man who has fought

Against illusion and was, in a great grinding

Of growling teeth, and falls at night, snuffed out

By the obese opiates of sleep. Plain men in plain towns