Becomes the place of things as they are,

A composing of senses of the guitar.

VII

It is the sun that shares our works.

The moon shares nothing. It is a sea.

When shall I come to say of the sun,

It is a sea; it shares nothing;

The sun no longer shares our works

And the earth is alive with creeping men,

Mechanical beetles never quite warm?

And shall I then stand in the sun, as now

I stand in the moon, and call it good,

The immaculate, the merciful good,

Detached from us, from things as they are?

Not to be part of the sun? To stand

Remote and call it merciful?

The strings are cold on the blue guitar.

VIII

The vivid, florid, turgid sky,

The drenching thunder rolling by,

The morning deluged still by night,

The clouds tumultuously bright

And the feeling heavy in cold chords

Struggling toward impassioned choirs,

Crying among the clouds, enraged

By gold antagonists in air—

I know my lazy, leaden twang

Is like the reason in a storm;

And yet it brings the storm to bear.

I twang it out and leave it there.

IX

And the color, the overcast blue

Of the air, in which the blue guitar

Is a form, described but difficult,

And I am merely a shadow hunched

Above the arrowy, still strings,

The maker of a thing yet to be made;

The color like a thought that grows

Out of a mood, the tragic robe

Of the actor, half his gesture, half

His speech, the dress of his meaning, silk

Sodden with his melancholy words,

The weather of his stage, himself.

X

Raise reddest columns. Toll a bell

And clap the hollows full of tin.

Throw papers in the streets, the wills

Of the dead, majestic in their seals.

And the beautiful trombones—behold

The approach of him whom none believes,

Whom all believe that all believe,

A pagan in a varnished car.

Roll a drum upon the blue guitar.

Lean from the steeple. Cry aloud,

“Here am I, my adversary, that

Confront you, hoo-ing the slick trombones,

Yet with a petty misery

At heart, a petty misery,

Ever the prelude to your end,

The touch that topples men and rock.”

XI

Slowly the ivy on the stones

Becomes the stones. Women become

The cities, children become the fields

And men in waves become the sea.

It is the chord that falsifies.

The sea returns upon the men,

The fields entrap the children, brick

Is a weed and all the flies are caught,

Wingless and withered, but living alive.

The discord merely magnifies.

Deeper within the belly’s dark

Of time, time grows upon the rock.

XII

Tom-tom, c’est moi. The blue guitar

And I are one. The orchestra

Fills the high hall with shuffling men

High as the hall. The whirling noise

Of a multitude dwindles, all said,

To his breath that lies awake at night.

I know that timid breathing. Where

Do I begin and end? And where,