In imitation. The clouds preceded us

There was a muddy centre before we breathed.

There was a myth before the myth began,

Venerable and articulate and complete.

From this the poem springs: that we live in a place

That is not our own and, much more, not ourselves

And hard it is in spite of blazoned days.

We are the mimics. Clouds are pedagogues.

The air is not a mirror but bare board,

Coulisse bright-dark, tragic chiaroscuro

And comic color of the rose, in which

Abysmal instruments make sounds like pips

Of the sweeping meanings that we add to them.

V

The lion roars at the enraging desert,

Reddens the sand with his red-colored noise,

Defies red emptiness to evolve his match,

Master by foot and jaws and by the mane,

Most supple challenger. The elephant

Breaches the darkness of Ceylon with blares,

The glitter-goes on surfaces of tanks,

Shattering velvetest far-away. The bear,

The ponderous cinnamon, snarls in his mountain

At summer thunder and sleeps through winter snow.

But you, ephebe, look from your attic window,

Your mansard with a rented piano. You lie

In silence upon your bed. You clutch the corner

Of the pillow in your hand. You writhe and press

A bitter utterance from your writhing, dumb,

Yet voluble dumb violence. You look

Across the roofs as sigil and as ward

And in your centre mark them and are cowed …

These are the heroic children whom time breeds

Against the first idea—to lash the lion,

Caparison elephants, teach bears to juggle.

VI

Not to be realized because not to

Be seen, not to be loved nor hated because

Not to be realized. Weather by Franz Hals,

Brushed up by brushy winds in brushy clouds,

Wetted by blue, colder for white. Not to

Be spoken to, without a roof, without

First fruits, without the virginal of birds,

The dark-blown ceinture loosened, not relinquished.

Gay is, gay was, the gay forsythia

And yellow, yellow thins the Northern blue.

Without a name and nothing to be desired,

If only imagined but imagined well.

My house has changed a little in the sun.

The fragrance of the magnolias comes close,

False flick, false form, but falseness close to kin.

It must be visible or invisible,

Invisible or visible or both:

A seeing and unseeing in the eye.

The weather and the giant of the weather,

Say the weather, the mere weather, the mere air:

An abstraction blooded, as a man by thought.

VII

It feels good as it is without the giant,

A thinker of the first idea. Perhaps

The truth depends on a walk around a lake,

A composing as the body tires, a stop

To see hepatica, a stop to watch

A definition growing certain and

A wait within that certainty, a rest

In the swags of pine-trees bordering the lake.

Perhaps there are times of inherent excellence,

As when the cock crows on the left and all

Is well, incalculable balances,

At which a kind of Swiss perfection comes