It is true. Tonight the lilacs magnify

The easy passion, the ever-ready love

Of the lover that lies within us and we breathe

An odor evoking nothing, absolute.

We encounter in the dead middle of the night

The purple odor, the abundant bloom.

The lover sighs as for accessible bliss,

Which he can take within him on his breath,

Possess in his heart, conceal and nothing known.

For easy passion and ever-ready love

Are of our earthy birth and here and now

And where we live and everywhere we live,

As in the top-cloud of a May night-evening,

As in the courage of the ignorant man,

Who chants by book, in the heat of the scholar, who writes

The book, hot for another accessible bliss:

The fluctuations of certainty, the change

Of degrees of perception in the scholar’s dark.

VIII

On her trip around the world, Nanzia Nunzio

Confronted Ozymandias. She went

Alone and like a vestal long-prepared.

I am the spouse. She took her necklace off

And laid it in the sand. As I am, I am

The spouse. She opened her stone-studded belt.

I am the spouse, divested of bright gold,

The spouse beyond emerald or amethyst,

Beyond the burning body that I bear.

I am the woman stripped more nakedly

Than nakedness, standing before an inflexible

Order, saying I am the contemplated spouse.

Speak to me that, which spoken, will array me

In its own only precious ornament.

Set on me the spirit’s diamond coronal.

Clothe me entire in the final filament,

So that I tremble with such love so known

And myself am precious for your perfecting.

Then Ozymandias said the spouse, the bride

Is never naked. A fictive covering

Weaves always glistening from the heart and mind.

IX

The poem goes from the poet’s gibberish to

The gibberish of the vulgate and back again.

Does it move to and fro or is it of both

At once? Is it a luminous flittering

Or the concentration of a cloudy day?

Is there a poem that never reaches words

And one that chaffers the time away?

Is the poem both peculiar and general?

There’s a meditation there, in which there seems

To be an evasion, a thing not apprehended or

Not apprehended well. Does the poet

Evade us, as in a senseless element?

Evade, this hot, dependent orator,

The spokesman at our bluntest barriers,

Exponent by a form of speech, the speaker

Of a speech only a little of the tongue?

It is the gibberish of the vulgate that he seeks.

He tries by a peculiar speech to speak

The peculiar potency of the general,

To compound the imagination’s Latin with

The lingua franca et jocundissima.

X

A bench was his catalepsy, Theatre

Of Trope. He sat in the park. The water of

The lake was full of artificial things,

Like a page of music, like an upper air,

Like a momentary color, in which swans

Were seraphs, were saints, were changing essences.

The west wind was the music, the motion, the force