The very will of the nerves,

The crack across the pane,

The dirt along the sill.

A Weak Mind in the Mountains

There was the butcher’s hand.

He squeezed it and the blood

Spurted from between the fingers

And fell to the floor.

And then the body fell.

So afterward, at night,

The wind of Iceland and

The wind of Ceylon,

Meeting, gripped my mind,

Gripped it and grappled my thoughts.

The black wind of the sea

And the green wind

Whirled upon me.

The blood of the mind fell

To the floor. I slept.

Yet there was a man within me

Could have risen to the clouds,

Could have touched these winds,

Bent and broken them down,

Could have stood up sharply in the sky.

Parochial Theme

Long-tailed ponies go nosing the pine-lands,

Ponies of Parisians shooting on the hill.

The wind blows. In the wind, the voices

Have shapes that are not yet fully themselves,

Are sounds blown by a blower into shapes,

The blower squeezed to the thinnest mi of falsetto.

The hunters run to and fro. The heavy trees,

The grunting, shuffling branches, the robust,

The nocturnal, the antique, the blue-green pines

Deepen the feelings to inhuman depths.

These are the forest. This health is holy,

This halloo, halloo, halloo heard over the cries

Of those for whom a square room is a fire,

Of those whom the statues torture and keep down.

This health is holy, this descant of a self,

This barbarous chanting of what is strong, this blare.

But salvation here? What about the rattle of sticks

On tins and boxes? What about horses eaten by wind?

When spring comes and the skeletons of the hunters

Stretch themselves to rest in their first summer’s sun,

The spring will have a health of its own, with none

Of autumn’s halloo in its hair. So that closely, then,

Health follows after health. Salvation there:

There’s no such thing as life; or if there is,

It is faster than the weather, faster than

Any character. It is more than any scene:

Of the guillotine or of any glamorous hanging.

Piece the world together, boys, but not with your hands.

Poetry Is a Destructive Force

That’s what misery is,

Nothing to have at heart.

It is to have or nothing.

It is a thing to have,

A lion, an ox in his breast.

To feel it breathing there.

Corazon, stout dog,

Young ox, bow-legged bear,

He tastes its blood, not spit.

He is like a man

In the body of a violent beast.

Its muscles are his own …

The lion sleeps in the sun.

Its nose is on its paws.

It can kill a man.

The Poems of Our Climate

I

Clear water in a brilliant bowl,

Pink and white carnations. The light

In the room more like a snowy air,

Reflecting snow. A newly-fallen snow

At the end of winter when afternoons return.

Pink and white carnations—one desires

So much more than that. The day itself