It is full of the myrrh and camphor of summer

And Adirondack glittering. The cat hawks it

And the hawk cats it and we say spread sail,

Spread sail, we say spread white, spread way.

The shell is a shore. The egg of the sea

And the egg of the sky are in shells, in walls, in skins

And the egg of the earth lies deep within an egg.

Spread outward. Crack the round dome. Break through.

Have liberty not as the air within a grave

Or down a well. Breathe freedom, oh, my native,

In the space of horizons that neither love nor hate.

III

High poetry and low:

Experience in perihelion

Or in the penumbra of summer night—

The solemn sentences,

Like interior intonations,

The speech of truth in its true solitude,

A nature that is created in what it says,

The peace of the last intelligence;

Or the same thing without desire,

He that in this intelligence

Mistakes it for a world of objects,

Which, being green and blue, appease him,

By chance, or happy chance, or happiness,

According to his thought, in the Mediterranean

Of the quiet of the middle of the night,

With the broken statues standing on the shore.

IV

The sad smell of the lilacs—one remembered it,

Not as the fragrance of Persephone,

Nor of a widow Dooley,

But as of an exhumation returned to earth,

The rich earth, of its own self made rich,

Fertile of its own leaves and days and wars,

Of its brown wheat rapturous in the wind,

The nature of its women in the air,

The stern voices of its necessitous men,

This chorus as of those that wanted to live.

The sentiment of the fatal is a part

Of filial love. Or is it the element,

An approximation of an element,

A little thing to think of on Sunday walks,

Something not to be mentioned to Mrs. Dooley,

An arrogant dagger darting its arrogance,

In the parent’s hand, perhaps parental love?

One wished that there had been a season,

Longer and later, in which the lilacs opened

And spread about them a warmer, rosier odor.

V

We’ll give the week-end to wisdom, to Weisheit, the rabbi,

Lucidity of his city, joy of his nation,

The state of circumstance.

The thinker as reader reads what has been written.

He wears the words he reads to look upon

Within his being,

A crown within him of crispest diamonds,

A reddened garment falling to his feet,

A hand of light to turn the page,

A finger with a ring to guide his eye

From line to line, as we lie on the grass and listen

To that which has no speech,

The voluble intentions of the symbols,

The ghostly celebrations of the picnic,

The secretions of insight.

VI

The world imagines for the beholder.

He is born the blank mechanic of the mountains,

The blank frere of fields, their matin laborer.

He is the possessed of sense not the possessor.