As I strum the thing, do I pick up

That which momentously declares

Itself not to be I and yet

Must be. It could be nothing else.

XIII

The pale intrusions into blue

Are corrupting pallors … ay di mi,

Blue buds or pitchy blooms. Be content—

Expansions, diffusions—content to be

The unspotted imbecile revery,

The heraldic center of the world

Of blue, blue sleek with a hundred chins,

The amorist Adjective aflame …

XIV

First one beam, then another, then

A thousand are radiant in the sky.

Each is both star and orb; and day

Is the riches of their atmosphere.

The sea appends its tattery hues.

The shores are banks of muffling mist.

One says a German chandelier—

A candle is enough to light the world.

It makes it clear. Even at noon

It glistens in essential dark.

At night, it lights the fruit and wine,

The book and bread, things as they are,

In a chiaroscuro where

One sits and plays the blue guitar.

XV

Is this picture of Picasso’s, this “hoard

Of destructions,” a picture of ourselves,

Now, an image of our society?

Do I sit, deformed, a naked egg,

Catching at Good-bye, harvest moon,

Without seeing the harvest or the moon?

Things as they are have been destroyed.

Have I? Am I a man that is dead

At a table on which the food is cold?

Is my thought a memory, not alive?

Is the spot on the floor, there, wine or blood

And whichever it may be, is it mine?

XVI

The earth is not earth but a stone,

Not the mother that held men as they fell

But stone, but like a stone, no: not

The mother, but an oppressor, but like

An oppressor that grudges them their death,

As it grudges the living that they live.

To live in war, to live at war,

To chop the sullen psaltery,

To improve the sewers in Jerusalem,

To electrify the nimbuses—

Place honey on the altars and die,

You lovers that are bitter at heart.

XVII

The person has a mould. But not

Its animal. The angelic ones

Speak of the soul, the mind. It is

An animal. The blue guitar—

On that its claws propound, its fangs

Articulate its desert days.

The blue guitar a mould? That shell?

Well, after all, the north wind blows

A horn, on which its victory

Is a worm composing on a straw.

XVIII

A dream (to call it a dream) in which

I can believe, in face of the object,

A dream no longer a dream, a thing,

Of things as they are, as the blue guitar

After long strumming on certain nights

Gives the touch of the senses, not of the hand,

But the very senses as they touch

The wind-gloss. Or as daylight comes,

Like light in a mirroring of cliffs,

Rising upward from a sea of ex.

XIX

That I may reduce the monster to

Myself, and then may be myself

In face of the monster, be more than part