Mrs. Alfred Uruguay

So what said the others and the sun went down

And, in the brown blues of evening, the lady said,

In the donkey’s ear, “I fear that elegance

Must struggle like the rest.” She climbed until

The moonlight in her lap, mewing her velvet,

And her dress were one and she said, “I have said no

To everything, in order to get at myself.

I have wiped away moonlight like mud. Your innocent ear

And I, if I rode naked, are what remain.”

The moonlight crumbled to degenerate forms,

While she approached the real, upon her mountain,

With lofty darkness. The donkey was there to ride,

To hold by the ear, even though it wished for a bell,

Wished faithfully for a falsifying bell.

Neither the moonlight could change it. And for her,

To be, regardless of velvet, could never be more

Than to be, she could never differently be,

Her no and no made yes impossible.

Who was it passed her there on a horse all will,

What figure of capable imagination?

Whose horse clattered on the road on which she rose,

As it descended, blind to her velvet and

The moonlight? Was it a rider intent on the sun,

A youth, a lover with phosphorescent hair,

Dressed poorly, arrogant of his streaming forces,

Lost in an integration of the martyrs’ bones,

Rushing from what was real; and capable?

The villages slept as the capable man went down,

Time swished on the village clocks and dreams were alive,

The enormous gongs gave edges to their sounds,

As the rider, no chevalere and poorly dressed,

Impatient of the bells and midnight forms,

Rode over the picket rocks, rode down the road,

And, capable, created in his mind,

Eventual victor, out of the martyrs’ bones,

The ultimate elegance: the imagined land.

Asides on the Oboe

The prologues are over. It is a question, now,

Of final belief. So, say that final belief

Must be in a fiction. It is time to choose.

I

That obsolete fiction of the wide river in

An empty land; the gods that Boucher killed;

And the metal heroes that time granulates—

The philosophers’ man alone still walks in dew,

Still by the sea-side mutters milky lines

Concerning an immaculate imagery.

If you say on the hautboy man is not enough,

Can never stand as god, is ever wrong

In the end, however naked, tall, there is still

The impossible possible philosophers’ man,

The man who has had the time to think enough,

The central man, the human globe, responsive

As a mirror with a voice, the man of glass,

Who in a million diamonds sums us up.

II

He is the transparence of the place in which

He is and in his poems we find peace.

He sets this peddler’s pie and cries in summer,

The glass man, cold and numbered, dewily cries,

“Thou art not August unless I make thee so.”

Clandestine steps upon imagined stairs

Climb through the night, because his cuckoos call.