And always at this antipodes, of leaden loaves

Held in the hands of blue men that are lead within,

One thinks that it could be that the first word spoken,

The desire for speech and meaning gallantly fulfilled,

The gathering of the imbecile against his motes

And the wry antipodes whirled round the world away—

One thinks, when the houses of New England catch the first sun,

The first word would be of the susceptible being arrived,

The immaculate disclosure of the secret no more obscured.

The sprawling of winter might suddenly stand erect,

Pronouncing its new life and ours, not autumn’s prodigal returned,

But an antipodal, far-fetched creature, worthy of birth,

The true tone of the metal of winter in what it says:

The accent of deviation in the living thing

That is its life preserved, the effort to be born

Surviving being born, the event of life.

The Course of a Particular

Today the leaves cry, hanging on branches swept by wind,

Yet the nothingness of winter becomes a little less.

It is still full of icy shades and shapen snow.

The leaves cry … One holds off and merely hears the cry.

It is a busy cry, concerning someone else.

And though one says that one is part of everything,

There is a conflict, there is a resistance involved;

And being part is an exertion that declines:

One feels the life of that which gives life as it is.

The leaves cry. It is not a cry of divine attention,

Nor the smoke-drift of puffed-out heroes, nor human cry.

It is the cry of leaves that do not transcend themselves,

In the absence of fantasia, without meaning more

Than they are in the final finding of the ear, in the thing

Itself, until, at last, the cry concerns no one at all.

Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour

Light the first light of evening, as in a room

In which we rest and, for small reason, think

The world imagined is the ultimate good.

This is, therefore, the intensest rendezvous.

It is in that thought that we collect ourselves,

Out of all the indifferences, into one thing:

Within a single thing, a single shawl

Wrapped tightly round us, since we are poor, a warmth,

A light, a power, the miraculous influence.

Here, now, we forget each other and ourselves.

We feel the obscurity of an order, a whole,

A knowledge, that which arranged the rendezvous,

Within its vital boundary, in the mind.

We say God and the imagination are one …

How high that highest candle lights the dark.

Out of this same light, out of the central mind,

We make a dwelling in the evening air,

In which being there together is enough.

Madame La Fleurie

Weight him down, O side-stars, with the great weightings of the end.

Seal him there. He looked in a glass of the earth and thought he lived in it.

Now, he brings all that he saw into the earth, to the waiting parent.