How clean the sun when seen in its idea,

Washed in the remotest cleanliness of a heaven

That has expelled us and our images …

The death of one god is the death of all.

Let purple Phoebus lie in umber harvest,

Let Phoebus slumber and die in autumn umber,

Phoebus is dead, ephebe. But Phoebus was

A name for something that never could be named.

There was a project for the sun and is.

There is a project for the sun. The sun

Must bear no name, gold flourisher, but be

In the difficulty of what it is to be.

II

It is the celestial ennui of apartments

That sends us back to the first idea, the quick

Of this invention; and yet so poisonous

Are the ravishments of truth, so fatal to

The truth itself, the first idea becomes

The hermit in a poet’s metaphors,

Who comes and goes and comes and goes all day.

May there be an ennui of the first idea?

What else, prodigious scholar, should there be?

The monastic man is an artist. The philosopher

Appoints man’s place in music, say, today.

But the priest desires. The philosopher desires.

And not to have is the beginning of desire.

To have what is not is its ancient cycle.

It is desire at the end of winter, when

It observes the effortless weather turning blue

And sees the myosotis on its bush.

Being virile, it hears the calendar hymn.

It knows that what it has is what is not

And throws it away like a thing of another time,

As morning throws off stale moonlight and shabby sleep.

III

The poem refreshes life so that we share,

For a moment, the first idea … It satisfies

Belief in an immaculate beginning

And sends us, winged by an unconscious will,

To an immaculate end. We move between these points:

From that ever-early candor to its late plural

And the candor of them is the strong exhilaration

Of what we feel from what we think, of thought

Beating in the heart, as if blood newly came,

An elixir, an excitation, a pure power.

The poem, through candor, brings back a power again

That gives a candid kind to everything.

We say: At night an Arabian in my room,

With his damned hoobla-hoobla-hoobla-how,

Inscribes a primitive astronomy

Across the unscrawled fores the future casts

And throws his stars around the floor. By day

The wood-dove used to chant his hoobla-hoo

And still the grossest iridescence of ocean

Howls hoo and rises and howls hoo and falls.

Life’s nonsense pierces us with strange relation.

IV

The first idea was not our own. Adam

In Eden was the father of Descartes

And Eve made air the mirror of herself,

Of her sons and of her daughters. They found themselves

In heaven as in a glass; a second earth;

And in the earth itself they found a green—

The inhabitants of a very varnished green.

But the first idea was not to shape the clouds