The trees are reappearing in poverty.

Without rain, there is the sadness of rain

And an air of lateness. The moon is a tricorn

Waved in pale adieu. The rex Impolitor

Will come stamping here, the ruler of less than men,

In less than nature. He is not here yet.

Here the adult one is still banded with fulgor,

Is still warm with the love with which she came,

Still touches solemnly with what she was

And willed. She has given too much, but not enough.

She is exhausted and a little old.

As at a Theatre

Another sunlight might make another world,

Green, more or less, in green and blue in blue,

Like taste distasting the first fruit of a vine,

Like an eye too young to grapple its primitive,

Like the artifice of a new reality,

Like the chromatic calendar of time to come.

It might be the candle of another being,

Ragged in unkempt perceptions, that stands

And meditates an image of itself,

Studies and shapes a tallowy image, swarmed

With slight, prismatic reeks not recollected,

A bubble without a wall on which to hang.

The curtains, when pulled, might show another whole,

An azure outre-terre, oranged and rosed,

At the elbow of Copernicus, a sphere,

A universe without life’s limp and lack,

Philosophers’ end … What difference would it make,

So long as the mind, for once, fulfilled itself?

The Rock

I

Seventy Years Later

It is an illusion that we were ever alive,

Lived in the houses of mothers, arranged ourselves

By our own motions in a freedom of air.

Regard the freedom of seventy years ago.

It is no longer air. The houses still stand,

Though they are rigid in rigid emptiness.

Even our shadows, their shadows, no longer remain.

The lives these lived in the mind are at an end.

They never were … The sounds of the guitar

Were not and are not. Absurd. The words spoken

Were not and are not. It is not to be believed.

The meeting at noon at the edge of the field seems like

An invention, an embrace between one desperate clod

And another in a fantastic consciousness,

In a queer assertion of humanity:

A theorem proposed between the two—

Two figures in a nature of the sun,

In the sun’s design of its own happiness,

As if nothingness contained a métier,

A vital assumption, an impermanence

In its permanent cold, an illusion so desired

That the green leaves came and covered the high rock,

That the lilacs came and bloomed, like a blindness cleaned,

Exclaiming bright sight, as it was satisfied,

In a birth of sight. The blooming and the musk

Were being alive, an incessant being alive,

A particular of being, that gross universe.

II

The Poem as Icon

It is not enough to cover the rock with leaves.

We must be cured of it by a cure of the ground

Or a cure of ourselves, that is equal to a cure

Of the ground, a cure beyond forgetfulness.