Holds in his hand a book you have never written

Staring at the secretions of the words as

They reveal themselves.

It is not midnight. It is mid-day,

The young man is well-disclosed, one of the gang,

Andrew Jackson Something. But this book

Is a cloud in which a voice mumbles.

It is a ghost that inhabits a cloud,

But a ghost for Andrew, not lean, catarrhal

And pallid. It is the grandfather he liked,

With an understanding compounded by death

And the associations beyond death, even if only

Time. What a thing it is to believe that

One understands, in the intense disclosures

Of a parent in the French sense.

And not yet to have written a book in which

One is already a grandfather and to have put there

A few sounds of meaning, a momentary end

To the complication, is good, is a good.

Somnambulisma

On an old shore, the vulgar ocean rolls

Noiselessly, noiselessly, resembling a thin bird,

That thinks of settling, yet never settles, on a nest.

The wings keep spreading and yet are never wings.

The claws keep scratching on the shale, the shallow shale,

The sounding shallow, until by water washed away.

The generations of the bird are all

By water washed away. They follow after.

They follow, follow, follow, in water washed away.

Without this bird that never settles, without

Its generations that follow in their universe,

The ocean, falling and falling on the hollow shore,

Would be a geography of the dead: not of that land

To which they may have gone, but of the place in which

They lived, in which they lacked a pervasive being,

In which no scholar, separately dwelling,

Poured forth the fine fins, the gawky beaks, the personalia,

Which, as a man feeling everything, were his.

The Creations of Sound

If the poetry of X was music,

So that it came to him of its own,

Without understanding, out of the wall

Or in the ceiling, in sounds not chosen,

Or chosen quickly, in a freedom

That was their element, we should not know

That X is an obstruction, a man

Too exactly himself, and that there are words

Better without an author, without a poet,

Or having a separate author, a different poet,

An accretion from ourselves, intelligent

Beyond intelligence, an artificial man

At a distance, a secondary expositor,

A being of sound, whom one does not approach

Through any exaggeration. From him, we collect.

Tell X that speech is not dirty silence

Clarified. It is silence made still dirtier.

It is more than an imitation for the ear.

He lacks this venerable complication.

His poems are not of the second part of life.

They do not make the visible a little hard

To see nor, reverberating, eke out the mind

On peculiar horns, themselves eked out

By the spontaneous particulars of sound.

We do not say ourselves like that in poems.

We say ourselves in syllables that rise

From the floor, rising in speech we do not speak.