On the Manner of Addressing Clouds

Gloomy grammarians in golden gowns,

Meekly you keep the mortal rendezvous,

Eliciting the still sustaining pomps

Of speech which are like music so profound

They seem an exaltation without sound.

Funest philosophers and ponderers,

Their evocations are the speech of clouds.

So speech of your processionals returns

In the casual evocations of your tread

Across the stale, mysterious seasons. These

Are the music of meet resignation; these

The responsive, still sustaining pomps for you

To magnify, if in that drifting waste

You are to be accompanied by more

Than mute bare splendors of the sun and moon.

Of Heaven Considered as a Tomb

What word have you, interpreters, of men

Who in the tomb of heaven walk by night,

The darkened ghosts of our old comedy?

Do they believe they range the gusty cold,

With lanterns borne aloft to light the way,

Freemen of death, about and still about

To find whatever it is they seek? Or does

That burial, pillared up each day as porte

And spiritous passage into nothingness,

Foretell each night the one abysmal night,

When the host shall no more wander, nor the light

Of the steadfast lanterns creep across the dark?

Make hue among the dark comedians,

Halloo them in the topmost distances

For answer from their icy Élysée.

The Bird with the Coppery, Keen Claws

Above the forest of the parakeets,

A parakeet of parakeets prevails,

A pip of life amid a mort of tails.

(The rudiments of tropics are around,

Aloe of ivory, pear of rusty rind.)

His lids are white because his eyes are blind.

He is not paradise of parakeets,

Of his gold ether, golden alguazil,

Except because he broods there and is still.

Panache upon panache, his tails deploy

Upward and outward, in green-vented forms,

His tip a drop of water full of storms.

But though the turbulent tinges undulate

As his pure intellect applies its laws,

He moves not on his coppery, keen claws.

He munches a dry shell while he exerts

His will, yet never ceases, perfect cock,

To flare, in the sun-pallor of his rock.

The Comedian as the Letter C

I

The World without Imagination

Nota: man is the intelligence of his soil,

The sovereign ghost. As such, the Socrates

Of snails, musician of pears, principium

And lex. Sed quæritur: is this same wig

Of things, this nincompated pedagogue,

Preceptor to the sea? Crispin at sea

Created, in his day, a touch of doubt.

An eye most apt in gelatines and jupes,

Berries of villages, a barber’s eye,

An eye of land, of simple salad-beds,

Of honest quilts, the eye of Crispin, hung

On porpoises, instead of apricots,

And on silentious porpoises, whose snouts

Dibbled in waves that were mustachios,

Inscrutable hair in an inscrutable world.

One eats one paté, even of salt, quotha.

It was not so much the lost terrestrial,

The snug hibernal from that sea and salt,

That century of wind in a single puff.

What counted was mythology of self,