Filled its encrusted fountains, they arrayed

The twilights of the mythy goober khan.

The centuries of excellence to be

Rose out of promise and became the sooth

Of trombones floating in the trees.

The toil

Of thought evoked a peace eccentric to

The eye and tinkling to the ear. Gruff drums

Could beat, yet not alarm the populace.

The indolent progressions of the swans

Made earth come right; a peanut parody

For peanut people.

And serener myth

Conceiving from its perfect plenitude,

Lusty as June, more fruitful than the weeks

Of ripest summer, always lingering

To touch again the hottest bloom, to strike

Once more the longest resonance, to cap

The clearest woman with apt weed, to mount

The thickest man on thickest stallion-back,

This urgent, competent, serener myth

Passed like a circus.

Politic man ordained

Imagination as the fateful sin.

Grandmother and her basketful of pears

Must be the crux for our compendia.

That’s world enough, and more, if one includes

Her daughters to the peached and ivory wench

For whom the towers are built. The burgher’s breast,

And not a delicate ether star-impaled,

Must be the place for prodigy, unless

Prodigious things are tricks. The world is not

The bauble of the sleepless nor a word

That should import a universal pith

To Cuba. Jot these milky matters down.

They nourish Jupiters. Their casual pap

Will drop like sweetness in the empty nights

When too great rhapsody is left annulled

And liquorish prayer provokes new sweats: so, so:

Life is an old casino in a wood.

IV

Is the function of the poet here mere sound,

Subtler than the ornatest prophecy,

To stuff the ear? It causes him to make

His infinite repetition and alloys

Of pick of ebon, pick of halcyon.

It weights him with nice logic for the prim.

As part of nature he is part of us.

His rarities are ours: may they be fit

And reconcile us to our selves in those

True reconcilings, dark, pacific words,

And the adroiter harmonies of their fall.

Close the cantina. Hood the chandelier.

The moonlight is not yellow but a white

That silences the ever-faithful town.

How pale and how possessed a night it is,

How full of exhalations of the sea …

All this is older than its oldest hymn,

Has no more meaning than tomorrow’s bread.

But let the poet on his balcony

Speak and the sleepers in their sleep shall move,

Waken, and watch the moonlight on their floors.

This may be benediction, sepulcher,

And epitaph. It may, however, be

An incantation that the moon defines

By mere example opulently clear.

And the old casino likewise may define

An infinite incantation of our selves

In the grand decadence of the perished swans.

Sea Surface Full of Clouds

I

In that November off Tehuantepec,

The slopping of the sea grew still one night

And in the morning summer hued the deck

And made one think of rosy chocolate

And gilt umbrellas. Paradisal green

Gave suavity to the perplexed machine