It is established. There the dove

Makes this small howling, like a thought

That howls in the mind or like a man

Who keeps seeking out his identity

In that which is and is established … It howls

Of the great sizes of an outer bush

And the great misery of the doubt of it,

Of stripes of silver that are strips

Like slits across a space, a place

And state of being large and light.

There is this bubbling before the sun,

This howling at one’s ear, too far

For daylight and too near for sleep.

The Planet on the Table

Ariel was glad he had written his poems.

They were of a remembered time

Or of something seen that he liked.

Other makings of the sun

Were waste and welter

And the ripe shrub writhed.

His self and the sun were one

And his poems, although makings of his self,

Were no less makings of the sun.

It was not important that they survive.

What mattered was that they should bear

Some lineament or character,

Some affluence, if only half-perceived,

In the poverty of their words,

Of the planet of which they were part.

The River of Rivers in Connecticut

There is a great river this side of Stygia,

Before one comes to the first black cataracts

And trees that lack the intelligence of trees.

In that river, far this side of Stygia,

The mere flowing of the water is a gayety,

Flashing and flashing in the sun. On its banks,

No shadow walks. The river is fateful,

Like the last one. But there is no ferryman.

He could not bend against its propelling force.

It is not to be seen beneath the appearances

That tell of it. The steeple at Farmington

Stands glistening and Haddam shines and sways.

It is the third commonness with light and air,

A curriculum, a vigor, a local abstraction …

Call it, once more, a river, an unnamed flowing,

Space-filled, reflecting the seasons, the folk-lore

Of each of the senses; call it, again and again,

The river that flows nowhere, like a sea.

Not Ideas about the Thing but the Thing Itself

At the earliest ending of winter,

In March, a scrawny cry from outside

Seemed like a sound in his mind.

He knew that he heard it,

A bird’s cry, at daylight or before,

In the early March wind.

The sun was rising at six,

No longer a battered panache above snow …

It would have been outside.

It was not from the vast ventriloquism

Of sleep’s faded papier-mâché…

The sun was coming from outside.

That scrawny cry—It was

A chorister whose c preceded the choir.

It was part of the colossal sun,

Surrounded by its choral rings,

Still far away. It was like

A new knowledge of reality.

The Sail of Ulysses

Under the shape of his sail, Ulysses,

Symbol of the seeker, crossing by night

The giant sea, read his own mind.

He said, “As I know, I am and have