O sceptre of the sun, crown of the moon,

There is not nothing, no, no, never nothing,

Like the clashed edges of two words that kill.”

And so I mocked her in magnificent measure.

Or was it that I mocked myself alone?

I wish that I might be a thinking stone.

The sea of spuming thought foists up again

The radiant bubble that she was. And then

A deep up-pouring from some saltier well

Within me, bursts its watery syllable.

II

A red bird flies across the golden floor.

It is a red bird that seeks out his choir

Among the choirs of wind and wet and wing.

A torrent will fall from him when he finds.

Shall I uncrumple this much-crumpled thing?

I am a man of fortune greeting heirs;

For it has come that thus I greet the spring.

These choirs of welcome choir for me farewell.

No spring can follow past meridian.

Yet you persist with anecdotal bliss

To make believe a starry connaissance.

III

Is it for nothing, then, that old Chinese

Sat tittivating by their mountain pools

Or in the Yangtse studied out their beards?

I shall not play the flat historic scale.

You know how Utamaro’s beauties sought

The end of love in their all-speaking braids.

You know the mountainous coiffures of Bath.

Alas! Have all the barbers lived in vain

That not one curl in nature has survived?

Why, without pity on these studious ghosts,

Do you come dripping in your hair from sleep?

IV

This luscious and impeccable fruit of life

Falls, it appears, of its own weight to earth.

When you were Eve, its acrid juice was sweet,

Untasted, in its heavenly, orchard air.

An apple serves as well as any skull

To be the book in which to read a round,

And is as excellent, in that it is composed

Of what, like skulls, comes rotting back to ground.

But it excels in this, that as the fruit

Of love, it is a book too mad to read

Before one merely reads to pass the time.

V

In the high west there burns a furious star.

It is for fiery boys that star was set

And for sweet-smelling virgins close to them.

The measure of the intensity of love

Is measure, also, of the verve of earth.

For me, the firefly’s quick, electric stroke

Ticks tediously the time of one more year.

And you? Remember how the crickets came

Out of their mother grass, like little kin,

In the pale nights, when your first imagery

Found inklings of your bond to all that dust.

VI

If men at forty will be painting lakes

The ephemeral blues must merge for them in one,

The basic slate, the universal hue.

There is a substance in us that prevails.

But in our amours amorists discern

Such fluctuations that their scrivening

Is breathless to attend each quirky turn.

When amorists grow bald, then amours shrink

Into the compass and curriculum

Of introspective exiles, lecturing.