And through the eye equates ten thousand deaths

With a single well-tempered apricot, or, say,

An egg-plant of good air.

My beards, attend

To the laughter of evil: the fierce ricanery

With the ferocious chu-chot-chu between, the sobs

For breath to laugh the louder, the deeper gasps

Uplifting the completest rhetoric

Of sneers, the fugues commencing at the toes

And ending at the finger-tips.… It is death

That is ten thousand deaths and evil death.

Be tranquil in your wounds. It is good death

That puts an end to evil death and dies.

Be tranquil in your wounds. The placating star

Shall be the gentler for the death you die

And the helpless philosophers say still helpful things.

Plato, the reddened flower, the erotic bird.

III

The lean cats of the arches of the churches,

That’s the old world. In the new, all men are priests.

They preach and they are preaching in a land

To be described. They are preaching in a time

To be described. Evangelists of what?

If they could gather their theses into one,

Collect their thoughts together into one,

Into a single thought, thus: into a queen,

An intercessor by innate rapport,

Or into a dark-blue king, un roi tonnerre,

Whose merely being was his valiance,

Panjandrum and central heart and mind of minds—

If they could! Or is it the multitude of thoughts,

Like insects in the depths of the mind, that kill

The single thought? The multitudes of men

That kill the single man, starvation’s head,

One man, their bread and their remembered wine?

The lean cats of the arches of the churches

Bask in the sun in which they feel transparent,

As if designed by X, the per-noble master.

They have a sense of their design and savor

The sunlight. They bear brightly the little beyond

Themselves, the slightly unjust drawing that is

Their genius: the exquisite errors of time.

IV

On an early Sunday in April, a feeble day,

He felt curious about the winter hills

And wondered about the water in the lake.

It had been cold since December. Snow fell, first,

At New Year and, from then until April, lay

On everything. Now it had melted, leaving

The gray grass like a pallet, closely pressed;

And dirt. The wind blew in the empty place.

The winter wind blew in an empty place—

There was that difference between the and an,

The difference between himself and no man,

No man that heard a wind in an empty place.

No man that heard a wind in an empty place.

It was time to be himself again, to see

If the place, in spite of its witheredness, was still

Within the difference. He felt curious

Whether the water was black and lashed about

Or whether the ice still covered the lake. There was still

Snow under the trees and on the northern rocks,

The dead rocks not the green rocks, the live rocks. If,

When he looked, the water ran up the air or grew white