Of music—Her body lies

Worn out, her arm falls down,

Her fingers touch the ground.

Above her, to the left,

A brush of white, the obscure,

The moon without a shape,

A fringed eye in a crypt.

The sense creates the pose.

In this it moves and speaks.

This is the figure and not

An evading metaphor.

Add this. It is to add.

Dry Loaf

It is equal to living in a tragic land

To live in a tragic time.

Regard now the sloping, mountainous rocks

And the river that batters its way over stones,

Regard the hovels of those that live in this land.

That was what I painted behind the loaf,

The rocks not even touched by snow,

The pines along the river and the dry men blown

Brown as the bread, thinking of birds

Flying from burning countries and brown sand shores,

Birds that came like dirty water in waves

Flowing above the rocks, flowing over the sky,

As if the sky was a current that bore them along,

Spreading them as waves spread flat on the shore,

One after another washing the mountains bare.

It was the battering of drums I heard

It was hunger, it was the hungry that cried

And the waves, the waves were soldiers moving,

Marching and marching in a tragic time

Below me, on the asphalt, under the trees.

It was soldiers went marching over the rocks

And still the birds came, came in watery flocks,

Because it was spring and the birds had to come.

No doubt that soldiers had to be marching

And that drums had to be rolling, rolling, rolling.

The Man on the Dump

Day creeps down. The moon is creeping up.

The sun is a corbeil of flowers the moon Blanche

Places there, a bouquet. Ho-ho … The dump is full

Of images. Days pass like papers from a press.

The bouquets come here in the papers. So the sun,

And so the moon, both come, and the janitor’s poems

Of every day, the wrapper on the can of pears,

The cat in the paper-bag, the corset, the box

From Esthonia: the tiger chest, for tea.

The freshness of night has been fresh a long time.

The freshness of morning, the blowing of day, one says

That it puffs as Cornelius Nepos reads, it puffs

More than, less than or it puffs like this or that.

The green smacks in the eye, the dew in the green

Smacks like fresh water in a can, like the sea

On a cocoanut—how many men have copied dew

For buttons, how many women have covered themselves

With dew, dew dresses, stones and chains of dew, heads

Of the floweriest flowers dewed with the dewiest dew.

One grows to hate these things except on the dump.

Now, in the time of spring (azaleas, trilliums,

Myrtle, viburnums, daffodils, blue phlox),

Between that disgust and this, between the things

That are on the dump (azaleas and so on)

And those that will be (azaleas and so on),