In the taste for iron dogs and iron deer.

XXVIII

A pear should come to the table popped with juice,

Ripened in warmth and served in warmth. On terms

Like these, autumn beguiles the fatalist.

XXIX

Choke every ghost with acted violence,

Stamp down the phosphorescent toes, tear off

The spittling tissues tight across the bones.

The heavy bells are tolling rowdy-dow.

XXX

The hen-cock crows at midnight and lays no egg,

The cock-hen crows all day. But cockerel shrieks,

Hen shudders: the copious egg is made and laid.

XXXI

A teeming millpond or a furious mind.

Gray grasses rolling windily away

And bristling thorn-trees spinning on the bank.

The actual is a deft beneficence.

XXXII

Poetry is a finikin thing of air

That lives uncertainly and not for long

Yet radiantly beyond much lustier blurs.

XXXIII

For all his purple, the purple bird must have

Notes for his comfort that he may repeat

Through the gross tedium of being rare.

XXXIV

A calm November. Sunday in the fields.

A reflection stagnant in a stagnant stream.

Yet invisible currents clearly circulate.

XXXV

Men and the affairs of men seldom concerned

This pundit of the weather, who never ceased

To think of man the abstraction, the comic sum.

XXXVI

The children will be crying on the stair,

Half-way to bed, when the phrase will be spoken,

The starry voluptuary will be born.

XXXVII

Yesterday the roses were rising upward,

Pushing their buds above the dark green leaves,

Noble in autumn, yet nobler than autumn.

XXXVIII

The album of Corot is premature.

A little later when the sky is black.

Mist that is golden is not wholly mist.

XXXIX

Not the ocean of the virtuosi

But the ugly alien, the mask that speaks

Things unintelligible, yet understood.

XL

Always the standard repertoire in line

And that would be perfection, if each began

Not by beginning but at the last man’s end.

XLI

The chrysanthemums’ astringent fragrance comes

Each year to disguise the clanking mechanism

Of machine within machine within machine.

XLII

God of the sausage-makers, sacred guild,

Or possibly, the merest patron saint

Ennobled as in a mirror to sanctity.

XLIII

It is curious that the density of life

On a given plane is ascertainable

By dividing the number of legs one sees by two.

At least the number of people may thus be fixed.

XLIV

Freshness is more than the east wind blowing round one.

There is no such thing as innocence in autumn,

Yet, it may be, innocence is never lost.

XLV

Encore un instant de bonheur. The words

Are a woman’s words, unlikely to satisfy

The taste of even a country connoisseur.

XLVI

Everything ticks like a clock. The cabinet

Of a man gone mad, after all, for time, in spite

Of the cuckoos, a man with a mania for clocks.

XLVII

The sun is seeking something bright to shine on.

The trees are wooden, the grass is yellow and thin.

The ponds are not the surfaces it seeks.