Whose head lies blurring here, for this he died.

Taste of the blood upon his martyred lips,

O pensioners, O demagogues and pay-men!

This death was his belief though death is a stone.

This man loved earth, not heaven, enough to die.

The night wind blows upon the dreamer, bent

Over words that are life’s voluble utterance.

A Thought Revolved

I

The Mechanical Optimist

A lady dying of diabetes

Listened to the radio,

Catching the lesser dithyrambs.

So heaven collects its bleating lambs.

Her useless bracelets fondly fluttered,

Paddling the melodic swirls,

The idea of god no longer sputtered

At the roots of her indifferent curls.

The idea of the Alps grew large,

Not yet, however, a thing to die in.

It seemed serener just to die,

To float off in the floweriest barge,

Accompanied by the exegesis

Of familiar things in a cheerful voice,

Like the night before Christmas and all the carols.

Dying lady, rejoice, rejoice!

II

Mystic Garden & Middling Beast

The poet striding among the cigar stores,

Ryan’s lunch, hatters, insurance and medicines,

Denies that abstraction is a vice except

To the fatuous. These are his infernal walls,

A space of stone, of inexplicable base

And peaks outsoaring possible adjectives.

One man, the idea of man, that is the space,

The true abstract in which he promenades.

The era of the idea of man, the cloak

And speech of Virgil dropped, that’s where he walks,

That’s where his hymns come crowding, hero-hymns,

Chorals for mountain voices and the moral chant,

Happy rather than holy but happy-high,

Day hymns instead of constellated rhymes,

Hymns of the struggle of the idea of god

And the idea of man, the mystic garden and

The middling beast, the garden of paradise

And he that created the garden and peopled it.

III

Romanesque Affabulation

He sought an earthly leader who could stand

Without panache, without cockade,

Son only of man and sun of men,

The outer captain, the inner saint,

The pine, the pillar and the priest,

The voice, the book, the hidden well,

The faster’s feast and heavy-fruited star,

The father, the beater of the rigid drums,

He that at midnight touches the guitar,

The solitude, the barrier, the Pole

In Paris, celui qui chante et pleure,

Winter devising summer in its breast,

Summer assaulted, thundering, illumed,

Shelter yet thrower of the summer spear,

With all his attributes no god but man

Of men whose heaven is in themselves,

Or else whose hell, foamed with their blood

And the long echo of their dying cry,

A fate intoned, a death before they die,

The race that sings and weeps and knows not why.

IV

The Leader

Behold the moralist hidalgo

Whose whore is Morning Star

Dressed in metal, silk and stone,

Syringa, cicada, his flea.

In how severe a book he read,

Until his nose grew thin and taut

And knowledge dropped upon his heart

Its pitting poison, half the night.

He liked the nobler works of man,

The gold façade round early squares,