The sun is the country wherever he is. The bird

In the brightest landscape downwardly revolves

Disdaining each astringent ripening,

Evading the point of redness, not content

To repose in an hour or season or long era

Of the country colors crowding against it, since

The yellow grassman’s mind is still immense,

Still promises perfections cast away.

VII

How red the rose that is the soldier’s wound,

The wounds of many soldiers, the wounds of all

The soldiers that have fallen, red in blood,

The soldier of time grown deathless in great size.

A mountain in which no ease is ever found,

Unless indifference to deeper death

Is ease, stands in the dark, a shadows’ hill,

And there the soldier of time has deathless rest.

Concentric circles of shadows, motionless

Of their own part, yet moving on the wind,

Form mystical convolutions in the sleep

Of time’s red soldier deathless on his bed.

The shadows of his fellows ring him round

In the high night, the summer breathes for them

Its fragrance, a heavy somnolence, and for him,

For the soldier of time, it breathes a summer sleep,

In which his wound is good because life was.

No part of him was ever part of death.

A woman smoothes her forehead with her hand

And the soldier of time lies calm beneath that stroke.

VIII

The death of Satan was a tragedy

For the imagination. A capital

Negation destroyed him in his tenement

And, with him, many blue phenomena.

It was not the end he had foreseen. He knew

That his revenge created filial

Revenges. And negation was eccentric.

It had nothing of the Julian thunder-cloud:

The assassin flash and rumble … He was denied.

Phantoms, what have you left? What underground?

What place in which to be is not enough

To be? You go, poor phantoms, without place

Like silver in the sheathing of the sight,

As the eye closes … How cold the vacancy

When the phantoms are gone and the shaken realist

First sees reality. The mortal no

Has its emptiness and tragic expirations.

The tragedy, however, may have begun,

Again, in the imagination’s new beginning,

In the yes of the realist spoken because he must

Say yes, spoken because under every no

Lay a passion for yes that had never been broken.

IX

Panic in the face of the moon—round effendi

Or the phosphored sleep in which he walks abroad

Or the majolica dish heaped up with phosphored fruit

That he sends ahead, out of the goodness of his heart,

To anyone that comes—panic, because

The moon is no longer these nor anything

And nothing is left but comic ugliness

Or a lustred nothingness. Effendi, he

That has lost the folly of the moon becomes

The prince of the proverbs of pure poverty.

To lose sensibility, to see what one sees,

As if sight had not its own miraculous thrift,

To hear only what one hears, one meaning alone,

As if the paradise of meaning ceased