To the total thing, a shapeless giant forced

Upward.

Green were the curls upon that head.

Oak Leaves Are Hands

In Hydaspia, by Howzen,

Lived a lady, Lady Lowzen,

For whom what is was other things.

Flora she was once. She was florid

A bachelor of feen masquerie,

Evasive and metamorphorid.

Mac Mort she had been, ago,

Twelve-legged in her ancestral hells,

Weaving and weaving many arms.

Even now, the centre of something else,

Merely by putting hand to brow,

Brooding on centuries like shells.

As the acorn broods on former oaks

In memorials of Northern sound,

Skims the real for its unreal,

So she in Hydaspia created

Out of the movement of few words,

Flora Lowzen invigorated

Archaic and future happenings,

In glittering seven-colored changes,

By Howzen, the chromatic Lowzen.

Examination of the Hero in a Time of War

I

Force is my lot and not pink-clustered

Roma ni Avignon ni Leyden,

And cold, my element. Death is my

Master and, without light, I dwell. There

The snow hangs heavily on the rocks, brought

By a wind that seeks out shelter from snow. Thus

Each man spoke in winter. Yet each man spoke of

The brightness of arms, said Roma wasted

In its own dirt, said Avignon was

Peace in a time of peace, said Leyden

Was always the other mind. The brightness

Of arms, the will opposed to cold, fate

In its cavern, wings subtler than any mercy,

These were the psalter of their sybils.

II

The Got whome we serve is able to deliver

Us. Good chemistry, good common man, what

Of that angelic sword? Creature of

Ten times ten times dynamite, convulsive

Angel, convulsive shatterer, gun,

Click, click, the Got whom we serve is able,

Still, still to deliver us, still magic,

Still moving yet motionless in smoke, still

One with us, in the heaved-up noise, still

Captain, the man of skill, the expert

Leader, the creator of bursting color

And rainbow sortilege, the savage weapon

Against enemies, against the prester,

Presto, whose whispers prickle the spirit.

III

They are sick of each old romance, returning,

Of each old revolving dance, the music

Like a euphony in a museum

Of euphonies, a skin from Nubia,

A helio-horn. How strange the hero

To this accurate, exacting eye. Sight

Hangs heaven with flash drapery. Sight

Is a museum of things seen. Sight,

In war, observes each man profoundly.

Yes. But these sudden sublimations

Are to combat what his exaltations

Are to the unaccountable prophet or

What any fury to its noble centre.

IV

To grasp the hero, the eccentric

On a horse, in a plane, at the piano—

At the piano, scales, arpeggios

And chords, the morning exercises,

The afternoon’s reading, the night’s reflection,

That’s how to produce a virtuoso.

The drill of a submarine. The voyage

Beyond the oyster-beds, indigo

Shadow, up the great sea and downward

And darkly beside the vulcanic

Sea-tower, sea-pinnacles, sea-mountain.

The signal … The sea-tower, shaken,

Sways slightly and the pinnacles frisson.