And yet the leaves, if they broke into bud,

If they broke into bloom, if they bore fruit,

And if we ate the incipient colorings

Of their fresh culls might be a cure of the ground.

The fiction of the leaves is the icon

Of the poem, the figuration of blessedness,

And the icon is the man. The pearled chaplet of spring,

The magnum wreath of summer, time’s autumn snood,

Its copy of the sun, these cover the rock.

These leaves are the poem, the icon and the man.

These are a cure of the ground and of ourselves,

In the predicate that there is nothing else.

They bud and bloom and bear their fruit without change.

They are more than leaves that cover the barren rock.

They bud the whitest eye, the pallidest sprout,

New senses in the engenderings of sense,

The desire to be at the end of distances,

The body quickened and the mind in root.

They bloom as a man loves, as he lives in love.

They bear their fruit so that the year is known,

As if its understanding was brown skin,

The honey in its pulp, the final found,

The plenty of the year and of the world.

In this plenty, the poem makes meanings of the rock,

Of such mixed motion and such imagery

That its barrenness becomes a thousand things

And so exists no more. This is the cure

Of leaves and of the ground and of ourselves.

His words are both the icon and the man.

III

Forms of the Rock in a Night-Hymn

The rock is the gray particular of man’s life,

The stone from which he rises, up—and—ho,

The step to the bleaker depths of his descents …

The rock is the stern particular of the air,

The mirror of the planets, one by one,

But through man’s eye, their silent rhapsodist,

Turquoise the rock, at odious evening bright

With redness that sticks fast to evil dreams;

The difficult rightness of half-risen day.

The rock is the habitation of the whole,

Its strength and measure, that which is near, point A

In a perspective that begins again

At B: the origin of the mango’s rind.

It is the rock where tranquil must adduce

Its tranquil self, the main of things, the mind,

The starting point of the human and the end,

That in which space itself is contained, the gate

To the enclosure, day, the things illumined

By day, night and that which night illumines,

Night and its midnight-minting fragrances,

Night’s hymn of the rock, as in a vivid sleep.

A Discovery of Thought

At the antipodes of poetry, dark winter,

When the trees glitter with that which despoils them,

Daylight evaporates, like a sound one hears in sickness.

One is a child again. The gold beards of waterfalls

Are dissolved as in an infancy of blue snow.

It is an arbor against the wind, a pit in the mist,

A trinkling in the parentage of the north,

The cricket of summer forming itself out of ice.