On the motive! But one looks at the sea

As one improvises, on the piano.

IX

This cloudy world, by aid of land and sea,

Night and day, wind and quiet, produces

More nights, more days, more clouds, more worlds.

X

To change nature, not merely to change ideas,

To escape from the body, so to feel

Those feelings that the body balks,

The feelings of the natures round us here:

As a boat feels when it cuts blue water.

XI

Now, the timothy at Pemaquid

That rolled in heat is silver-tipped

And cold. The moon follows the sun like a French

Translation of a Russian poet.

XII

Everywhere the spruce trees bury soldiers:

Hugh March, a sergeant, a redcoat, killed,

With his men, beyond the barbican.

Everywhere spruce trees bury spruce trees.

XIII

Cover the sea with the sand rose. Fill

The sky with the radiantiana

Of spray. Let all the salt be gone.

XIV

Words add to the senses. The words for the dazzle

Of mica, the dithering of grass,

The Arachne integument of dead trees,

Are the eye grown larger, more intense.

XV

The last island and its inhabitant,

The two alike, distinguish blues,

Until the difference between air

And sea exists by grace alone,

In objects, as white this, white that.

XVI

Round and round goes the bell of the water

And round and round goes the water itself

And that which is the pitch of its motion,

The bell of its dome, the patron of sound.

XVII

Pass through the door and through the walls,

Those bearing balsam, its field fragrance,

Pine-figures bringing sleep to sleep.

XVIII

Low tide, flat water, sultry sun.

One observes profoundest shadows rolling.

Damariscotta da da doo.

XIX

One boy swims under a tub, one sits

On top. Hurroo, the man-boat comes,

In a man-makenesse, neater than Naples.

XX

You could almost see the brass on her gleaming,

Not quite. The mist was to light what red

Is to fire. And her mainmast tapered to nothing,

Without teetering a millimeter’s measure.

The beads on her rails seemed to grasp at transparence.

It was not yet the hour to be dauntlessly leaping.

Man and Bottle

The mind is the great poem of winter, the man,

Who, to find what will suffice,

Destroys romantic tenements

Of rose and ice

In the land of war. More than the man, it is

A man with the fury of a race of men,

A light at the centre of many lights,

A man at the centre of men.

It has to content the reason concerning war,

It has to persuade that war is part of itself,

A manner of thinking, a mode

Of destroying, as the mind destroys,

An aversion, as the world is averted

From an old delusion, an old affair with the sun,

An impossible aberration with the moon,

A grossness of peace.

It is not the snow that is the quill, the page.

The poem lashes more fiercely than the wind,

As the mind, to find what will suffice, destroys