On a woman, day on night, the imagined

On the real. This is the origin of change.

Winter and spring, cold copulars, embrace

And forth the particulars of rapture come.

Music falls on the silence like a sense,

A passion that we feel, not understand.

Morning and afternoon are clasped together

And North and South are an intrinsic couple

And sun and rain a plural, like two lovers

That walk away as one in the greenest body.

In solitude the trumpets of solitude

Are not of another solitude resounding;

A little string speaks for a crowd of voices.

The partaker partakes of that which changes him.

The child that touches takes character from the thing,

The body, it touches. The captain and his men

Are one and the sailor and the sea are one.

Follow after, O my companion, my fellow, my self,

Sister and solace, brother and delight.

V

On a blue island in a sky-wide water

The wild orange trees continued to bloom and to bear,

Long after the planter’s death. A few limes remained,

Where his house had fallen, three scraggy trees weighted

With garbled green. These were the planter’s turquoise

And his orange blotches, these were his zero green,

A green baked greener in the greenest sun.

These were his beaches, his sea-myrtles in

White sand, his patter of the long sea-slushes.

There was an island beyond him on which rested,

An island to the South, on which rested like

A mountain, a pineapple pungent as Cuban summer.

And là-bas, là-bas, the cool bananas grew,

Hung heavily on the great banana tree,

Which pierces clouds and bends on half the world.

He thought often of the land from which he came,

How that whole country was a melon, pink

If seen rightly and yet a possible red.

An unaffected man in a negative light

Could not have borne his labor nor have died

Sighing that he should leave the banjo’s twang.

VI

Bethou me, said sparrow, to the crackled blade,

And you, and you, bethou me as you blow,

When in my coppice you behold me be.

Ah, ké! the bloody wren, the felon jay,

Ké-ké, the jug-throated robin pouring out,

Bethou, bethou, bethou me in my glade.

There was such idiot minstrelsy in rain,

So many clappers going without bells,

That these bethous compose a heavenly gong.

One voice repeating, one tireless chorister,

The phrases of a single phrase, ké-ké,

A single text, granite monotony,

One sole face, like a photograph of fate,

Glass-blower’s destiny, bloodless episcopus,

Eye without lid, mind without any dream—

These are of minstrels lacking minstrelsy,

Of an earth in which the first leaf is the tale

Of leaves, in which the sparrow is a bird

Of stone, that never changes. Bethou him, you

And you, bethou him and bethou. It is

A sound like any other. It will end.

VII

After a lustre of the moon, we say

We have not the need of any paradise,

We have not the need of any seducing hymn.