The Dover Anthology of American Literature Volume II (89 page)

        
A damsel heightened by eternal bloom.

VIII

        
Like a dull scholar, I behold, in love,

        
An ancient aspect touching a new mind.

        
It comes, it blooms, it bears its fruit and dies.

        
This trivial trope reveals a way of truth.

        
Our bloom is gone. We are the fruit thereof.

        
Two golden gourds distended on our vines,

        
We hang like warty squashes, streaked and rayed,

        
Into the autumn weather, splashed with frost,

        
Distorted by hale fatness, turned grotesque.

        
The laughing sky will see the two of us

        
Washed into rinds by rotting winter rains.

IX

        
In verses wild with motion, full of din,

        
Loudened by cries, by clashes, quick and sure

        
As the deadly thought of men accomplishing

        
Their curious fates in war, come, celebrate

        
The faith of forty, ward of Cupido.

        
Most venerable heart, the lustiest conceit

        
Is
not too lusty for your broadening.

        
I quiz all sounds, all thoughts, all everything

        
For the music and manner of the paladins

        
To make oblation fit. Where shall I find

        
Bravura adequate to this great hymn?

X

        
The fops of fancy in their poems leave

        
Memorabilia of the mystic spouts,

        
Spontaneously watering their gritty soils.

        
I am a yeoman, as such fellows go.

        
I know no magic trees, no balmy boughs,

        
No silver-ruddy, gold-vermilion fruits.

        
But, after all, I know a tree that bears

        
A semblance to the thing I have in mind.

        
It stands gigantic, with a certain tip

        
To which all birds come sometime in their time.

        
But when they go that tip still tips the tree.

XI

        
If sex were all, then every trembling hand

        
Could make us squeak, like dolls, the wished-for words.

        
But note the unconscionable treachery of fate,

        
That makes us weep, laugh, grunt and groan, and shout

        
Doleful heroics, pinching gestures forth

        
From madness or delight, without regard

        
To that first, foremost law. Anguishing hour!

        
Last night, we sat beside a pool of pink,

        
Clippered with lilies, scudding the bright chromes,

        
Keen to the point of starlight, while a frog

        
Boomed from his very belly, odious chords.

XII

        
A blue pigeon it is, that circles the blue sky,

        
On side-long wing, around and round and round.

        
A white pigeon it is, that flutters to the ground,

        
Grown tired of flight. Like a dark rabbi, I

        
Observed, when young, the nature of mankind,

        
In
lordly study. Every day, I found

        
Man proved a gobbet in my mincing world.

        
Like a rose rabbi, later, I pursued,

        
And still pursue, the origin and course

        
Of love, but until now I never knew

        
That fluttering things have so distinct a shade.

S
OURCE:
Others: A Magazine of the New Verse.
(December 1918).

Earthy
Anecdote
(1919)

                
Every time the bucks went clattering

                
Over Oklahoma,

                
A firecat bristled in the way.

                
Wherever they went,

                
They went clattering,

                
Until they swerved,

                
In a swift, circular line,

                
To the right,

                
Because of the firecat.

                
Or until they swerved,

                
In a swift, circular line,

                
To the left,

                
Because of the firecat.

                
The bucks clattered.

                
The firecat went leaping,

                
To the right, to the left,

                
And

                
Bristled in the way.

                
Later, the firecat closed his bright eyes

                
And slept.

S
OURCE:
Others: A Magazine of the New Verse
(July 1919).

Anecdote
of the Jar
(1919)

                
I placed a jar in Tennessee,

                
And round it was, upon a hill.

                
It made the slovenly wilderness

                
Surround that hill.

                
The wilderness rose up to it,

                
And sprawled around, no longer wild.

                
The jar was round upon the ground

                
And tall and of a port in air.

                
It took dominion everywhere.

                
The jar was gray and bare.

                
It did not give of bird or bush,

                
Like nothing else in Tennessee.

S
OURCE:
Poetry
(October 1919).

The
Man Whose Pharynx Was Bad
(1921)

            
The time of year has grown indifferent.

            
Mildew of summer and the deepening snow

            
Are both alike in the routine I know.

            
I am too dumbly in my being pent.

            
The wind attendant on the solstices

            
Blows on the shutters of the metropoles,

            
Stirring no poet in his sleep, and tolls

            
The grand ideas of the villages.

            
The malady of the quotidian . . .

            
Perhaps, if summer ever came to rest

            
And lengthened, deepened, comforted, caressed

            
Through days like oceans in obsidian

            
Horizons full of night's midsummer blaze;

            
Perhaps, if winter once could penetrate

            
Through
all its purples to the final slate,

            
Persisting bleakly in an icy haze;

            
One might in turn become less diffident—

            
Out of such mildew plucking neater mould

            
And spouting new orations of the cold.

            
One might. One might. But time will not relent.

S
OURCE:
The New Republic
(September 14, 1921).

The
Snow Man
(1921)

            
One must have a mind of winter

            
To regard the frost and the boughs

            
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;

            
And have been cold a long time

            
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,

            
The spruces rough in the distant glitter

            
Of the January sun; and not to think

            
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,

            
In the sound of a few leaves,

            
Which is the sound of the land

            
Full of the same wind

            
That is blowing in the same bare place

            
For the listener, who listens in the snow,

            
And, nothing himself, beholds

            
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

S
OURCE:
Poetry
(October 1921).

Of
Heaven Considered as a Tomb
(1921)

        
What word have you, interpreters, of men

        
Who in the tomb of heaven walk by night,

        
The darkened ghosts of our old comedy?

        
Do they believe they range the gusty cold,

        
With lanterns borne aloft to light the way,

        
Freemen of death, about and still about

        
To find whatever it is they seek? Or does

        
That burial, pillared up each day as porte

        
And spiritous passage into nothingness,

        
Foretell each night the one abysmal night,

        
When the host shall no more wander, nor the light

        
Of the steadfast lanterns creep across the dark?

        
Make hue among the dark comedians,

        
Halloo them in the topmost distances

        
For answer from their icy Elysée.

S
OURCE:
Poetry
(October 1921).

The
Bird with the Coppery, Keen Claws
(1921)

            
Above the forest of the parakeets,

            
A parakeet of parakeets prevails,

            
A pip of life amid a mort of tails.

            
(The rudiments of tropics are around,

            
Aloe of ivory, pear of rusty rind).

            
His lids are white because his eyes are blind.

            
He is not paradise of parakeets,

            
Of his gold ether, golden alguazil,

            
Except because he broods there and is still.

            
Panache upon panache, his tails deploy

            
Upward and outward, in green-vented forms,

            
His tip a drop of water full of storms.

            
But
though the turbulent tinges undulate

            
As his pure intellect applies its laws,

            
He moves not on his coppery, keen claws.

            
He munches a dry shell while he exerts

            
His will, yet never ceases, perfect cock,

            
To flare, in the sun-pallor of his rock.