As acutest virtue and ascetic trove.

Item: The cocks crow and the birds cry and

The sun expands, like a repetition on

One string, an absolute, not varying

Toward an inaccessible, pure sound.

Item: The wind is never rounding O

And, imageless, it is itself the most,

Mouthing its constant smatter throughout space.

Item: The green fish pensive in green reeds

Is an absolute. Item: The cataracts

As facts fall like rejuvenating rain,

Fall down through nakedness to nakedness,

To the auroral creature musing in the mind.

Item: Breathe, breathe upon the centre of

The breath life’s latest, thousand senses.

But let this one sense be the single main.

And yet what good were yesterday’s devotions?

I affirm and then at midnight the great cat

Leaps quickly from the fireside and is gone.

Metamorphosis

Yillow, yillow, yillow,

Old worm, my pretty quirk,

How the wind spells out

Sep - tem - ber.…

Summer is in bones.

Cock-robin’s at Caracas.

Make o, make o, make o,

Oto - otu - bre.

And the rude leaves fall.

The rain falls. The sky

Falls and lies with the worms.

The street lamps

Are those that have been hanged,

Dangling in an illogical

To and to and fro

Fro Niz - nil - imbo.

Phosphor Reading by His Own Light

It is difficult to read. The page is dark.

Yet he knows what it is that he expects.

The page is blank or a frame without a glass

Or a glass that is empty when he looks.

The greenness of night lies on the page and goes

Down deeply in the empty glass …

Look, realist, not knowing what you expect.

The green falls on you as you look,

Falls on and makes and gives, even a speech.

And you think that that is what you expect,

That elemental parent, the green night,

Teaching a fusky alphabet.

Jumbo

The trees were plucked like iron bars

And jumbo, the loud general-large

Singsonged and singsonged, wildly free.

Who was the musician, fatly soft

And wildly free, whose clawing thumb

Clawed on the ear these consonants?

Who the transformer, himself transformed,

Whose single being, single form

Were their resemblances to ours?

The companion in nothingness,

Loud, general, large, fat, soft

And wild and free, the secondary man,

Cloud-clown, blue painter, sun as horn,

Hill-scholar, man that never is,

The bad-bespoken lacker,

Ancestor of Narcissus, prince

Of the secondary men. There are no rocks

And stones, only this imager.

Poem Written at Morning

A sunny day’s complete Poussiniana

Divide it from itself. It is this or that

And it is not.

By metaphor you paint

A thing. Thus, the pineapple was a leather fruit,

A fruit for pewter, thorned and palmed and blue,

To be served by men of ice.

The senses paint

By metaphor. The juice was fragranter

Than wettest cinnamon. It was cribled pears

Dripping a morning sap.

The truth must be

That you do not see, you experience, you feel,

That the buxom eye brings merely its element