With the inhalations of original cold

And of original earliness. Yet the sense

Of cold and earliness is a daily sense,

Not the predicate of bright origin.

Creation is not renewed by images

Of lone wanderers. To re-create, to use

The cold and earliness and bright origin

Is to search. Likewise to say of the evening star,

The most ancient light in the most ancient sky,

That it is wholly an inner light, that it shines

From the sleepy bosom of the real, re-creates,

Searches a possible for its possibleness.

XXIII

The sun is half the world, half everything,

The bodiless half. There is always this bodiless half,

This illumination, this elevation, this future

Or, say, the late going colors of that past,

Effete green, the woman in black cassimere.

If, then, New Haven is half sun, what remains,

At evening, after dark, is the other half,

Lighted by space, big over those that sleep,

Of the single future of night, the single sleep,

As of a long, inevitable sound,

A kind of cozening and coaxing sound,

And the goodness of lying in a maternal sound,

Unfretted by day’s separate, several selves,

Being part of everything come together as one.

In this identity, disembodiments

Still keep occurring. What is, uncertainly,

Desire prolongs its adventure to create

Forms of farewell, furtive among green ferns.

XXIV

The consolations of space are nameless things.

It was after the neurosis of winter. It was

In the genius of summer that they blew up

The statue of Jove among the boomy clouds.

It took all day to quieten the sky

And then to refill its emptiness again,

So that at the edge of afternoon, not over,

Before the thought of evening had occurred

Or the sound of Incomincia had been set,

There was a clearing, a readiness for first bells,

An opening for outpouring, the hand was raised:

There was a willingness not yet composed,

A knowing that something certain had been proposed,

Which, without the statue, would be new,

An escape from repetition, a happening

In space and the self, that touched them both at once

And alike, a point of the sky or of the earth

Or of a town poised at the horizon’s dip.

XXV

Life fixed him, wandering on the stair of glass,

With its attentive eyes. And, as he stood,

On his balcony, outsensing distances,

There were looks that caught him out of empty air.

C’est toujours la vie qui me regarde … This was

Who watched him, always, for unfaithful thought.

This sat beside his bed, with its guitar,

To keep him from forgetting, without a word,

A note or two disclosing who it was.

Nothing about him ever stayed the same,

Except this hidalgo and his eye and tune,

The shawl across one shoulder and the hat.

The commonplace became a rumpling of blazons.

What was real turned into something most unreal,

Bare beggar-tree, hung low for fruited red

In isolated moments—isolations

Were false. The hidalgo was permanent, abstract,