The grass turned green and the grass turned gray.

And the nose is eternal, that-a-way.

Things as they were, things as they are,

Things as they will be by and by …

A fat thumb beats out ai-yi-yi.

XXVI

The world washed in his imagination,

The world was a shore, whether sound or form

Or light, the relic of farewells,

Rock, of valedictory echoings,

To which his imagination returned,

From which it sped, a bar in space,

Sand heaped in the clouds, giant that fought

Against the murderous alphabet:

The swarm of thoughts, the swarm of dreams

Of inaccessible Utopia.

A mountainous music always seemed

To be falling and to be passing away.

XXVII

It is the sea that whitens the roof.

The sea drifts through the winter air.

It is the sea that the north wind makes.

The sea is in the falling snow.

This gloom is the darkness of the sea.

Geographers and philosophers,

Regard. But for that salty cup,

But for the icicles on the eaves—

The sea is a form of ridicule.

The iceberg settings satirize

The demon that cannot be himself,

That tours to shift the shifting scene.

XXVIII

I am a native in this world

And think in it as a native thinks,

Gesu, not native of a mind

Thinking the thoughts I call my own,

Native, a native in the world

And like a native think in it.

It could not be a mind, the wave

In which the watery grasses flow

And yet are fixed as a photograph,

The wind in which the dead leaves blow.

Here I inhale profounder strength

And as I am, I speak and move

And things are as I think they are

And say they are on the blue guitar.

XXIX

In the cathedral, I sat there, and read,

Alone, a lean Review and said,

“These degustations in the vaults

Oppose the past and the festival.

What is beyond the cathedral, outside,

Balances with nuptial song.

So it is to sit and to balance things

To and to and to the point of still,

To say of one mask it is like,

To say of another it is like,

To know that the balance does not quite rest,

That the mask is strange, however like.”

The shapes are wrong and the sounds are false.

The bells are the bellowing of bulls.

Yet Franciscan don was never more

Himself than in this fertile glass.

XXX

From this I shall evolve a man.

This is his essence: the old fantoche

Hanging his shawl upon the wind,

Like something on the stage, puffed out,

His strutting studied through centuries.

At last, in spite of his manner, his eye

A-cock at the cross-piece on a pole

Supporting heavy cables, slung

Through Oxidia, banal suburb,

One-half of all its installments paid.

Dew-dapper clapper-traps, blazing

From crusty stacks above machines.

Ecce, Oxidia is the seed

Dropped out of this amber-ember pod,

Oxidia is the soot of fire,

Oxidia is Olympia.

XXXI

How long and late the pheasant sleeps …