Romantic tenements of rose and ice.

Of Modern Poetry

The poem of the mind in the act of finding

What will suffice. It has not always had

To find: the scene was set; it repeated what

Was in the script.

Then the theatre was changed

To something else. Its past was a souvenir.

It has to be living, to learn the speech of the place.

It has to face the men of the time and to meet

The women of the time. It has to think about war

And it has to find what will suffice. It has

To construct a new stage. It has to be on that stage

And, like an insatiable actor, slowly and

With meditation, speak words that in the ear,

In the delicatest ear of the mind, repeat,

Exactly, that which it wants to hear, at the sound

Of which, an invisible audience listens,

Not to the play, but to itself, expressed

In an emotion as of two people, as of two

Emotions becoming one. The actor is

A metaphysician in the dark, twanging

An instrument, twanging a wiry string that gives

Sounds passing through sudden rightnesses, wholly

Containing the mind, below which it cannot descend,

Beyond which it has no will to rise.

It must

Be the finding of a satisfaction, and may

Be of a man skating, a woman dancing, a woman

Combing. The poem of the act of the mind.

Arrival at the Waldorf

Home from Guatemala, back at the Waldorf.

This arrival in the wild country of the soul,

All approaches gone, being completely there,

Where the wild poem is a substitute

For the woman one loves or ought to love,

One wild rhapsody a fake for another.

You touch the hotel the way you touch moonlight

Or sunlight and you hum and the orchestra

Hums and you say “The world in a verse,

A generation sealed, men remoter than mountains,

Women invisible in music and motion and color,”

After that alien, point-blank, green and actual Guatemala.

Landscape with Boat

An anti-master-man, floribund ascetic.

He brushed away the thunder, then the clouds,

Then the colossal illusion of heaven. Yet still

The sky was blue. He wanted imperceptible air.

He wanted to see. He wanted the eye to see

And not be touched by blue. He wanted to know,

A naked man who regarded himself in the glass

Of air, who looked for the world beneath the blue,

Without blue, without any turquoise tint or phase,

Any azure under-side or after-color. Nabob

Of bones, he rejected, he denied, to arrive

At the neutral centre, the ominous element,

The single-colored, colorless, primitive.

It was not as if the truth lay where he thought,

Like a phantom, in an uncreated night.

It was easier to think it lay there. If

It was nowhere else, it was there and because

It was nowhere else, its place had to be supposed,

Itself had to be supposed, a thing supposed

In a place supposed, a thing that he reached