Is simplified: a bowl of white,

Cold, a cold porcelain, low and round,

With nothing more than the carnations there.

II

Say even that this complete simplicity

Stripped one of all one’s torments, concealed

The evilly compounded, vital I

And made it fresh in a world of white,

A world of clear water, brilliant-edged,

Still one would want more, one would need more,

More than a world of white and snowy scents.

III

There would still remain the never-resting mind,

So that one would want to escape, come back

To what had been so long composed.

The imperfect is our paradise.

Note that, in this bitterness, delight,

Since the imperfect is so hot in us,

Lies in flawed words and stubborn sounds.

Study of Two Pears

I

Opusculum paedagogum.

The pears are not viols,

Nudes or bottles.

They resemble nothing else.

II

They are yellow forms

Composed of curves

Bulging toward the base.

They are touched red.

III

They are not flat surfaces

Having curved outlines.

They are round

Tapering toward the top.

IV

In the way they are modelled

There are bits of blue.

A hard dry leaf hangs

From the stem.

V

The yellow glistens.

It glistens with various yellows,

Citrons, oranges and greens

Flowering over the skin.

VI

The shadows of the pears

Are blobs on the green cloth.

The pears are not seen

As the observer wills.

The Glass of Water

That the glass would melt in heat,

That the water would freeze in cold,

Shows that this object is merely a state,

One of many, between two poles. So,

In the metaphysical, there are these poles.

Here in the centre stands the glass. Light

Is the lion that comes down to drink. There

And in that state, the glass is a pool.

Ruddy are his eyes and ruddy are his claws

When light comes down to wet his frothy jaws

And in the water winding weeds move round.

And there and in another state—the refractions,

The metaphysica, the plastic parts of poems

Crash in the mind—But, fat Jocundus, worrying

About what stands here in the centre, not the glass,

But in the centre of our lives, this time, this day,

It is a state, this spring among the politicians

Playing cards. In a village of the indigenes,

One would have still to discover. Among the dogs and dung,

One would continue to contend with one’s ideas.

Add This to Rhetoric

It is posed and it is posed.

But in nature it merely grows.

Stones pose in the falling night;

And beggars dropping to sleep,

They pose themselves and their rags.

Shucks … lavender moonlight falls.

The buildings pose in the sky

And, as you paint, the clouds,

Grisaille, impearled, profound,

Pftt.… In the way you speak

You arrange, the thing is posed,

What in nature merely grows.

To-morrow when the sun,

For all your images,

Comes up as the sun, bull fire,

Your images will have left

No shadow of themselves.

The poses of speech, of paint,