To which the swans curveted, a will to change,

A will to make iris frettings on the blank.

There was a will to change, a necessitous

And present way, a presentation, a kind

Of volatile world, too constant to be denied,

The eye of a vagabond in metaphor

That catches our own. The casual is not

Enough. The freshness of transformation is

The freshness of a world. It is our own,

It is ourselves, the freshness of ourselves,

And that necessity and that presentation

Are rubbings of a glass in which we peer.

Of these beginnings, gay and green, propose

The suitable amours. Time will write them down.

It Must Give Pleasure

I

To sing jubilas at exact, accustomed times,

To be crested and wear the mane of a multitude

And so, as part, to exult with its great throat,

To speak of joy and to sing of it, borne on

The shoulders of joyous men, to feel the heart

That is the common, the bravest fundament,

This is a facile exercise. Jerome

Begat the tubas and the fire-wind strings,

The golden fingers picking dark-blue air:

For companies of voices moving there,

To find of sound the bleakest ancestor,

To find of light a music issuing

Whereon it falls in more than sensual mode.

But the difficultest rigor is forthwith,

On the image of what we see, to catch from that

Irrational moment its unreasoning,

As when the sun comes rising, when the sea

Clears deeply, when the moon hangs on the wall

Of heaven-haven. These are not things transformed.

Yet we are shaken by them as if they were.

We reason about them with a later reason.

II

The blue woman, linked and lacquered, at her window

Did not desire that feathery argentines

Should be cold silver, neither that frothy clouds

Should foam, be foamy waves, should move like them,

Nor that the sexual blossoms should repose

Without their fierce addictions, nor that the heat

Of summer, growing fragrant in the night,

Should strengthen her abortive dreams and take

In sleep its natural form. It was enough

For her that she remembered: the argentines

Of spring come to their places in the grape leaves

To cool their ruddy pulses; the frothy clouds

Are nothing but frothy clouds; the frothy blooms

Waste without puberty; and afterward,

When the harmonious heat of August pines

Enters the room, it drowses and is the night.

It was enough for her that she remembered.

The blue woman looked and from her window named

The corals of the dogwood, cold and clear,

Cold, coldly delineating, being real,

Clear and, except for the eye, without intrusion.

III

A lasting visage in a lasting bush,

A face of stone in an unending red,

Red-emerald, red-slitted-blue, a face of slate,

An ancient forehead hung with heavy hair,

The channel slots of rain, the red-rose-red

And weathered and the ruby-water-worn,

The vines around the throat, the shapeless lips,

The frown like serpents basking on the brow,

The spent feeling leaving nothing of itself,