III

One year, death and war prevented the jasmine scent

And the jasmine islands were bloody martyrdoms.

How was it then with the central man? Did we

Find peace? We found the sum of men. We found,

If we found the central evil, the central good.

We buried the fallen without jasmine crowns.

There was nothing he did not suffer, no; nor we.

It was not as if the jasmine ever returned.

But we and the diamond globe at last were one.

We had always been partly one. It was as we came

To see him, that we were wholly one, as we heard

Him chanting for those buried in their blood,

In the jasmine haunted forests, that we knew

The glass man, without external reference.

Poem with Rhythms

The hand between the candle and the wall

Grows large on the wall.

The mind between this light or that and space,

(This man in a room with an image of the world,

That woman waiting for the man she loves,)

Grows large against space:

There the man sees the image clearly at last.

There the woman receives her lover into her heart

And weeps on his breast, though he never comes.

It must be that the hand

Has a will to grow larger on the wall,

To grow larger and heavier and stronger than

The wall; and that the mind

Turns to its own figurations and declares,

“This image, this love, I compose myself

Of these. In these, I come forth outwardly.

In these, I wear a vital cleanliness,

Not as in air, bright-blue-resembling air,

But as in the powerful mirror of my wish and will.”

The Well Dressed Man with a Beard

After the final no there comes a yes

And on that yes the future world depends.

No was the night. Yes is this present sun.

If the rejected things, the things denied,

Slid over the western cataract, yet one,

One only, one thing that was firm, even

No greater than a cricket’s horn, no more

Than a thought to be rehearsed all day, a speech

Of the self that must sustain itself on speech,

One thing remaining, infallible, would be

Enough. Ah! douce campagna of that thing!

Ah! douce campagna, honey in the heart,

Green in the body, out of a petty phrase,

Out of a thing believed, a thing affirmed:

The form on the pillow humming while one sleeps,

The aureole above the humming house …

It can never be satisfied, the mind, never.

Montrachet-le-Jardin

What more is there to love than I have loved?

And if there be nothing more, O bright, O bright,

The chick, the chidder-barn and grassy chives

And great moon, cricket-impresario,

And, hoy, the impopulous purple-plated past,

Hoy, hoy, the blue bulls kneeling down to rest.

Chome! clicks the clock, if there be nothing more.

But if, but if there be something more to love,

Something in now a senseless syllable,

A shadow in the mind, a flourisher

Of sounds resembling sounds, efflorisant,