IV

Livre de Toutes Sortes de Fleurs D’Après Nature.

All sorts of flowers. That’s the sentimentalist.

When B. sat down at the piano and made

A transparence in which we heard music, made music

In which we heard transparent sounds, did he play

All sorts of notes? Or did he play only one

In an ecstasy of its associates,

Variations in the tones of a single sound,

The last, or sounds so single they seemed one?

And then that Spaniard of the rose, itself

Hot-hooded and dark-blooded, rescued the rose

From nature, each time he saw it, making it,

As he saw it, exist in his own especial eye.

Can we conceive of him as rescuing less,

As muffing the mistress for her several maids,

As foregoing the nakedest passion for barefoot

Philandering?…The genius of misfortune

Is not a sentimentalist. He is

That evil, that evil in the self, from which

In desperate hallow, rugged gesture, fault

Falls out on everything: the genius of

The mind, which is our being, wrong and wrong,

The genius of the body, which is our world,

Spent in the false engagements of the mind.

V

Softly let all true sympathizers come,

Without the inventions of sorrow or the sob

Beyond invention. Within what we permit,

Within the actual, the warm, the near,

So great a unity, that it is bliss,

Ties us to those we love. For this familiar,

This brother even in the father’s eye,

This brother half-spoken in the mother’s throat

And these regalia, these things disclosed,

These nebulous brilliancies in the smallest look

Of the being’s deepest darling, we forego

Lament, willingly forfeit the ai-ai

Of parades in the obscurer selvages.

Be near me, come closer, touch my hand, phrases

Compounded of dear relation, spoken twice,

Once by the lips, once by the services

Of central sense, these minutiae mean more

Than clouds, benevolences, distant heads.

These are within what we permit, in-bar

Exquisite in poverty against the suns

Of ex-bar, in-bar retaining attributes

With which we vested, once, the golden forms

And the damasked memory of the golden forms

And ex-bar’s flower and fire of the festivals

Of the damasked memory of the golden forms,

Before we were wholly human and knew ourselves.

VI

The sun, in clownish yellow, but not a clown,

Brings the day to perfection and then fails. He dwells

In a consummate prime, yet still desires

A further consummation. For the lunar month

He makes the tenderest research, intent

On a transmutation which, when seen, appears

To be askew. And space is filled with his

Rejected years. A big bird pecks at him

For food. The big bird’s boney appetite

Is as insatiable as the sun’s. The bird

Rose from an imperfection of its own

To feed on the yellow bloom of the yellow fruit

Dropped down from turquoise leaves. In the landscape of

The sun, its grossest appetite becomes less gross,

Yet, when corrected, has its curious lapses,

Its glitters, its divinations of serene

Indulgence out of all celestial sight.