To our sepulchral hollows. Love of the real

Is soft in three-four cornered fragrances

From five-six cornered leaves, and green, the signal

To the lover, and blue, as of a secret place

In the anonymous color of the universe.

Our breath is like a desperate element

That we must calm, the origin of a mother tongue

With which to speak to her, the capable

In the midst of foreignness, the syllable

Of recognition, avowal, impassioned cry,

The cry that contains its converse in itself,

In which looks and feelings mingle and are part

As a quick answer modifies a question,

Not wholly spoken in a conversation between

Two bodies disembodied in their talk,

Too fragile, too immediate for any speech.

IX

We keep coming back and coming back

To the real: to the hotel instead of the hymns

That fall upon it out of the wind. We seek

The poem of pure reality, untouched

By trope or deviation, straight to the word,

Straight to the transfixing object, to the object

At the exactest point at which it is itself,

Transfixing by being purely what it is,

A view of New Haven, say, through the certain eye,

The eye made clear of uncertainty, with the sight

Of simple seeing, without reflection. We seek

Nothing beyond reality. Within it,

Everything, the spirit’s alchemicana

Included, the spirit that goes roundabout

And through included, not merely the visible,

The solid, but the movable, the moment,

The coming on of feasts and the habits of saints,

The pattern of the heavens and high, night air.

X

It is fatal in the moon and empty there.

But, here, allons. The enigmatical

Beauty of each beautiful enigma

Becomes amassed in a total double-thing.

We do not know what is real and what is not.

We say of the moon, it is haunted by the man

Of bronze whose mind was made up and who, therefore, died.

We are not men of bronze and we are not dead.

His spirit is imprisoned in constant change.

But ours is not imprisoned. It resides

In a permanence composed of impermanence,

In a faithfulness as against the lunar light,

So that morning and evening are like promises kept,

So that the approaching sun and its arrival,

Its evening feast and the following festival,

This faithfulness of reality, this mode,

This tendance and venerable holding-in

Make gay the hallucinations in surfaces.

XI

In the metaphysical streets of the physical town

We remember the lion of Juda and we save

The phrase … Say of each lion of the spirit

It is a cat of a sleek transparency

That shines with a nocturnal shine alone.

The great cat must stand potent in the sun.

The phrase grows weak. The fact takes up the strength

Of the phrase. It contrives the self-same evocations

And Juda becomes New Haven or else must.

In the metaphysical streets, the profoundest forms

Go with the walker subtly walking there.

These he destroys with wafts of wakening,

Free from their majesty and yet in need