That streaking gold should speak in him

Or bask within his images and words?

If these rude instances impeach themselves

By force of rudeness, let the principle

Be plain. For application Crispin strove,

Abhorring Turk as Esquimau, the lute

As the marimba, the magnolia as rose.

Upon these premises propounding, he

Projected a colony that should extend

To the dusk of a whistling south below the south,

A comprehensive island hemisphere.

The man in Georgia waking among pines

Should be pine-spokesman. The responsive man,

Planting his pristine cores in Florida,

Should prick thereof, not on the psaltery,

But on the banjo’s categorical gut,

Tuck, tuck, while the flamingos flapped his bays.

Sepulchral señors, bibbling pale mescal,

Oblivious to the Aztec almanacs,

Should make the intricate Sierra scan.

And dark Brazilians in their cafés,

Musing immaculate, pampean dits,

Should scrawl a vigilant anthology,

To be their latest, lucent paramour.

These are the broadest instances. Crispin,

Progenitor of such extensive scope,

Was not indifferent to smart detail.

The melon should have apposite ritual,

Performed in verd apparel, and the peach,

When its black branches came to bud, belle day,

Should have an incantation. And again,

When piled on salvers its aroma steeped

The summer, it should have a sacrament

And celebration. Shrewd novitiates

Should be the clerks of our experience.

These bland excursions into time to come,

Related in romance to backward flights,

However prodigal, however proud,

Contained in their afflatus the reproach

That first drove Crispin to his wandering.

He could not be content with counterfeit,

With masquerade of thought, with hapless words

That must belie the racking masquerade,

With fictive flourishes that preordained

His passion’s permit, hang of coat, degree

Of buttons, measure of his salt. Such trash

Might help the blind, not him, serenely sly.

It irked beyond his patience. Hence it was,

Preferring text to gloss, he humbly served

Grotesque apprenticeship to chance event,

A clown, perhaps, but an aspiring clown.

There is a monotonous babbling in our dreams

That makes them our dependent heirs, the heirs

Of dreamers buried in our sleep, and not

The oncoming fantasies of better birth.

The apprentice knew these dreamers. If he dreamed

Their dreams, he did it in a gingerly way.

All dreams are vexing. Let them be expunged.

But let the rabbit run, the cock declaim.

Trinket pasticcio, flaunting skyey sheets,

With Crispin as the tiptoe cozener?

No, no: veracious page on page, exact.

V

A Nice Shady Home

Crispin as hermit, pure and capable,

Dwelt in the land. Perhaps if discontent

Had kept him still the pricking realist,

Choosing his element from droll confect

Of was and is and shall or ought to be,

Beyond Bordeaux, beyond Havana, far

Beyond carked Yucatan, he might have come

To colonize his polar planterdom

And jig his chits upon a cloudy knee.

But his emprize to that idea soon sped.

Crispin dwelt in the land and dwelling there

Slid from his continent by slow recess

To things within his actual eye, alert