Such count of beauty in the ways you wander?

Why are you so insistent on the sweeping

Poetry of sky and sea? . Are you, then, fonder

Of the circumference of earth’s impounding

Than of some sphere on which the mind might blunder,

If you, with irrepressible will, abounding

In . . wish for revelation,

Sought out the unknown new in your surrounding?

Domination of Black

At night, by the fire,

The colors of the bushes

And of the fallen leaves,

Repeating themselves,

Turned in the room,

Like the leaves themselves

Turning in the wind.

Yes: but the color of the heavy hemlocks

Came striding.

And I remembered the cry of the peacocks.

The colors of their tails

Were like the leaves themselves

Turning in the wind,

In the twilight wind.

They swept over the room,

Just as they flew from the boughs of the hemlocks

Down to the ground.

I heard them cry—the peacocks.

Was it a cry against the twilight

Or against the leaves themselves

Turning in the wind,

Turning as the flames

Turned in the fire,

Turning as the tails of the peacocks

Turned in the loud fire,

Loud as the hemlocks

Full of the cry of the peacocks?

Or was it a cry against the hemlocks?

Out of the window,

I saw how the planets gathered

Like the leaves themselves

Turning in the wind.

I saw how the night came,

Came striding like the color of the heavy hemlocks.

I felt afraid.

And I remembered the cry of the peacocks.

Six Significant Landscapes

I

An old man sits

In the shadow of a pine tree

In China.

He sees larkspur,

Blue and white,

At the edge of the shadow,

Move in the wind.

His beard moves in the wind.

The pine tree moves in the wind.

Thus water flows

Over weeds.

II

The night is of the color

Of a woman’s arm:

Night, the female,

Obscure,

Fragrant and supple,

Conceals herself.

A pool shines,

Like a bracelet

Shaken in a dance.

III

I measure myself

Against a tall tree.

I find that I am much taller,

For I reach right up to the sun,

With my eye;

And I reach to the shore of the sea

With my ear.

Nevertheless, I dislike

The way the ants crawl

In and out of my shadow.

IV

When my dream was near the moon,

The white folds of its gown

Filled with yellow light.

The soles of its feet

Grew red.

Its hair filled

With certain blue crystallizations

From stars,

Not far off.

V

Not all the knives of the lamp-posts,

Nor the chisels of the long streets,

Nor the mallets of the domes

And high towers,

Can carve

What one star can carve,

Shining through the grape-leaves.

VI

Rationalists, wearing square hats,

Think, in square rooms,

Looking at the floor,

Looking at the ceiling.

They confine themselves

To right-angled triangles.

If they tried rhomboids,

Cones, waving lines, ellipses—

As, for example, the ellipse of the half-moon—

Rationalists would wear sombreros.