Themselves and, therefore, good, the going round

And round and round, the merely going round,

Until merely going round is a final good,

The way wine comes at a table in a wood.

And we enjoy like men, the way a leaf

Above the table spins its constant spin,

So that we look at it with pleasure, look

At it spinning its eccentric measure. Perhaps,

The man-hero is not the exceptional monster,

But he that of repetition is most master.

X

Fat girl, terrestrial, my summer, my night,

How is it I find you in difference, see you there

In a moving contour, a change not quite completed?

You are familiar yet an aberration.

Civil, madam, I am, but underneath

A tree, this unprovoked sensation requires

That I should name you flatly, waste no words,

Check your evasions, hold you to yourself.

Even so when I think of you as strong or tired,

Bent over work, anxious, content, alone,

You remain the more than natural figure. You

Become the soft-footed phantom, the irrational

Distortion, however fragrant, however dear.

That’s it: the more than rational distortion,

The fiction that results from feeling. Yes, that.

They will get it straight one day at the Sorbonne.

We shall return at twilight from the lecture

Pleased that the irrational is rational,

Until flicked by feeling, in a gildered street,

I call you by name, my green, my fluent mundo.

You will have stopped revolving except in crystal.

_________

Soldier, there is a war between the mind

And sky, between thought and day and night. It is

For that the poet is always in the sun,

Patches the moon together in his room

To his Virgilian cadences, up down,

Up down. It is a war that never ends.

Yet it depends on yours. The two are one.

They are a plural, a right and left, a pair,

Two parallels that meet if only in

The meeting of their shadows or that meet

In a book in a barrack, a letter from Malay.

But your war ends. And after it you return

With six meats and twelve wines or else without

To walk another room … Monsieur and comrade,

The soldier is poor without the poet’s lines,

His petty syllabi, the sounds that stick,

Inevitably modulating, in the blood.

And war for war, each has its gallant kind.

How simply the fictive hero becomes the real;

How gladly with proper words the soldier dies,

If he must, or lives on the bread of faithful speech.

God Is Good. It Is a Beautiful Night

Look round, brown moon, brown bird, as you rise to fly,

Look round at the head and zither

On the ground.

Look round you as you start to rise, brown moon,

At the book and shoe, the rotted rose

At the door.

This was the place to which you came last night,

Flew close to, flew to without rising away.

Now, again,

In your light, the head is speaking. It reads the book.