Possibility of Being
Page 4
like Venus upright in her mussel shell;
look how that blusher there, as in confusion,
has turned towards a cooler bloom, and how
the cool one is unfeelingly withdrawing;
and how the cold one stands, wrapped in herself,
among those open roses doffing all.
And what they doff—the way it can appear
now light, now heavy—like a cloak, a burden,
a wing, a domino—it all depends—
and how they doff it: as before the loved one.
What can they not be: was that yellow one
that lies there hollow, open, not the rind
upon a fruit, in which that self-same yellow
was the intenser, orange-ruddier juice?
And did her blowing prove too much for this one,
since, touched by air, her nameless rosiness
assumed the bitter after-taste of lilac?
And is not yonder cambric one a dress,
wherein, still soft and breath-warm, clings the vest
flung off along with it among the shadows
of early morning by the woodland pool?
And what’s this opalescent porcelain,
so fragile, but a shallow china cup,
and full of little shining butterflies?
And that, containing nothing but herself?
And are not all just that, just self-containing,
if self-containing means: to take the world
and wind and rain and patience of the spring-time
and guilt and restlessness and muffled fate
and somberness of evening earth and even
the melting, fleeing, forming of the clouds
and the vague influence of distant stars,
and change it to a handful of Within?
It now lies heedless in those open roses.
ARCHAIC TORSO OF APOLLO
Though we’ve not known his unimagined head
and what divinity his eyes were showing,
his torso like a branching street-lamp’s glowing,
wherein his gaze, only turned down, can shed
light still. Or else the breast’s insurgency
could not be dazzling you, or you discerning
in that slight twist of loins a smile returning
to where was center’d his virility.
Or else this stone would not stand so intact
beneath the shoulders’ through-seen cataract
and would not glisten like a wild beast’s skin;
and would not keep from all its contours giving
light like a star: for there’s no place therein
that does not see you. You must change your living.
LEDA
When first the god set foot there in his need,
the swan’s great beauty almost frightened him;
he vanished into it with wits a-swim.
But his deceit onswept him to his deed
before the feelings of that life untried
could be experienced. And, all-robeless, she
knew who that comer in the swan must be,
and knew already that he eyed
what her confused endeavor to withstand
no longer could conceal. The god alighted,
and, necking through the ever-weaker hand,
loosed himself into her he doted on.
Then really felt his plumage and, delighted,
became within her lap entirely swan.
A PROPHET
Such as giant visions have dilated,
scintillating from the fiery train
of the judgments they have contemplated,
gaze his thickly superciliated
eyes, and words are being accumulated
deep within him once again:
not his own (for what could his words settle?
And how temperedly would they be dealt!),
other, harder: chunks of stone and metal,
which, like a volcano, he must melt
till eruptingly he sends them flying
from his mouth whose curses fill the air;
while his forehead like a dog’s is trying
conscientiously to bear
what from his the Lord has disengaged:
Him, Him, all would find beyond denial,
if they’d only follow those great dial-
hands that show Him as He is: enraged.
THE TEMPTATION
No, it didn’t help him, his inducing
sharp-toothed thorns into his lustful flesh;
all his teeming senses were producing,
with loud screams of labor, fresh
miscreations: leeringly-distorted
faces, partly crawling, partly flying,
nothings, whose maliciousness was eying
him alone, with whom it jointly sported.
Now his senses had proliferated;
for the pack was fruitful in the night,
and with stipple was centuplicated
still more parti-colorfully bright.
And a drink was brewed from their grimacing,
and his hands were grasping cup on cup,
and like thighs the shadow opened up,
warm and as awakened for embracing.—
And he screamed then for the angel, screamed:
And the angel, in his shiningness,
came and hounded all that had outstreamed
back into the saint’s own inwardness,
that he might contend there, year by year,
as before, with monstrous generation,
and distill from inner fermentation
God, the still as yet so far from clear.
ADAM
He, on the cathedral’s steep ascent,
stands and stares near where the window-rose is,
as if awed by the apotheosis
which, when it had reached its full extent,
set him over these and these below.
And he towers and joys in his duration,
plain-resolved; who started cultivation
first of all mankind, and did not know
how he’d find a way from Eden-garden,
ready-filled with all it could supply,
to the new Earth. God would only harden,
and, instead of granting him his prayer,
kept on threatening he should surely die.
But the man persisted: She will bear.
EVE
She, on the cathedral’s vast ascent,
simply stands there near the window-rose,
with the apple in the apple-pose,
ever henceforth guilty-innocent
of the growingness she brought to birth
since that time she lovingly departed
from the old eternities and started
struggling like a young year through the Earth.
Ah, she could have stayed so gladly, though,
just a little longer there, attending
to the sense and concord beasts would show.
But she found the man resolved to go,
so she went out with him, deathwards tending;
and yet God she’d scarcely got to know.
THE BLIND MAN
Paris
Look, his progress interrupts the scene,
absent from his dark perambulation,
like a dark crack’s interpenetration
of a bright cup. And, as on a screen,
all reflections things around are making
get depicted on him outwardly.
Just his feeling stirs, as if intaking
little waves of world invisibly:
here a stillness, there a counter-stand—
as if pondering whom to choose, he’ll tarry:
then surrenderingly he’ll lift his hand,
almost ritually, as if to marry.
THE GROUP
Paris
Like someone gathering a quick posy: so
Chanc
e here is hastily arranging faces,
widens and then contracts their interspaces,
seizes two distant, lets a nearer go,
drops this for that, blows weariness away,
rejects, like weed, a dog from the bouquet,
and pulls headforemost what’s too low, as through
a maze of stalks and petals, into view,
and binds it in, quite small, upon the hem;
stretches once more to change and separate,
and just has time, for one last look at them,
to spring back to the middle of the mat
on which, in one split second after that,
the glistening lifter’s swelling his own weight.
LATE AUTUMN IN VENICE
The city drifts no longer like a bait now,
upcatching all the days as they emerge.
Brittlier the glassy palaces vibrate now
beneath your gaze. And from each garden verge.
the summer like a bunch of puppets dangles,
headforemost, weary, made away.
Out of the ground, though, from dead forest tangles
volition mounts: as though before next day
the sea-commander must have rigged and ready
the galleys in the sleepless Arsenal,
and earliest morning air be tarred already
by an armada, oaringly outpressing,
and suddenly, with flare of flags, possessing
the great wind, radiant and invincible.
CORRIDA
In Memoriam Montez, 1830
Since, small almost, through the opened door
with upstartled eyes and ears he came
and supposed the baiting picador
and beribboned barbs to be a game,
that wild figure seems now to consist
of an ever-concentrating weight
of accumulated old black hate,
and his head is clenched into a fist,
no more meeting any playfully:
no, but rearing bloody barbs behind
those presented horns, and in his mind
his opponent from eternity,
who, in gold and mauve-pink silk arrayed,
suddenly turns round and, like a swarm
of bees, and as if vexed but undismayed,
lets the baffled beast beneath his arm
rush by—while his burning looks are lifting
up once more in tremulous accord,
as if all that circling throng were drifting
down from their own shine and sombering
and his eyelids’ every fluttering,
till, so unexcitedly, unhating,
leaning on himself, deliberating,
into that great wave’s refluctuance
over its dispersed precipitance
almost softly he insheathes his sword.
LADY BEFORE THE MIRROR
At the mirror’s surface she’ll begin
gently melting, like a spice-assortment
in a sleeping draught, her tired deportment;
and she’ll let her smiling drop right in.
And she’ll wait until the liquidness
rises from it; then she’ll pour her hair
in as well, and, lifting out one bare,
marvelous shoulder from her evening-dress,
quietly drink out of her image. Drink,
what a lover would in wild caresses,
tryingly, all mistrust; and never think
of beckoning her maid until she sees
at the mirror’s bottom candles, presses,
and a late hour’s undissolving lees.
THE FLAMINGOS
Jardin Des Plantes, Paris
In Fragonard-like mirrorings no more
of ail their white and red is proffered to you
than would have been conveyed if one who knew you
had said of her he’d chosen to adore:
“She was still soft with sleep.” For if, forsaking
pool for green grass, they stand together there,
rose-stalked, as in some blossoming parterre,
they’re taken by themselves with lures more taking
than Phryne’s; till they’ve necked that pallidness
of eye deep into their own downiness,
where black and ripe-fruit-ruddiness are hiding.
A screech of envy rends the aviary;
they, though, in stretched astonishment, are striding,
each singly, into the imaginary.
THE READER
Who knows him, he who’s let his face descend
to where a new existency engages,
only the rapid turn of crowded pages
will sometimes violently suspend?
Even his mother could not feel quite sure
it’s he, there reading something saturated
with his own shadow. And, clock-regulated,
can we know how much ebbed from him before
he laboringly uplooked: thereby upheaving
all the book’s deepness to the light of day,
with eyes which, now outgiving, not receiving,
impinged upon a filled environment:
as quiet children, after lonely play,
will suddenly perceive the situation;
his features, though, in full coordination,
remained forever different.
THE MOUNTAIN
Six-and-thirty and a hundred times
did the painter write the mountain peak,
sundered from it, driven back to seek
(six-and-thirty and a hundred times)
that incomprehensible volcano,
happy, full of trial, expedientless—
while, forever outlined, it would lay no
bridle on its surging gloriousness:
daily in a thousand ways uprearing,
letting each incomparable night
fall away, as being all too tight;
wearing out at once each new appearing,
every shape assumed the shiningmost,
far, opinionless, unsympathizing—
to be suddenly materializing
there behind each crevice like a ghost.
REQUIEM
(1909)
FOR A FRIEND
I have my dead, and I would let them go
and be surprised to see them all so cheerful,
so soon at home in being-dead, so right,
so unlike their repute. You, you alone,
return; brush past me, move about, persist
in knocking something that vibratingly
betrays you. Oh, don’t take from me what I
am slowly learning. I’m right; you’re mistaken,
if you’re disturbed into a home-sick longing
for something here. We transmute it all;
it’s not here, we reflect it from ourselves,
from our own being, as soon as we perceive it.
I thought you’d got much further. It confounds me
that you should thus mistake and come, who passed
all other women so in transmutation.
That we were frightened when you died, or, rather,
that your strong death made a dark interruption,
tearing the till-then from the ever-since:
that is our business: to set that in order
will be the work that everything provides us.
But that you too were frightened, even now
are frightened, now, when fright has lost its meaning,
that you are losing some of your eternity,
even a little, to step in here, friend, here,
where nothing yet exists; that in the All,
for the first time distracted and half-hearted,
you did not grasp the infinite ascension
as once you grasped each single thing on earth;
that from the orbit that already held you
the gravitation of some mute unrest
shou
ld drag you down to measurable time:
this often wakes me like an entering thief.
If I could say you merely deign to come
from magnanimity, from superabundance,
because you are so sure, so self-possessed,
that you can wander like a child, not frightened
of places where ther’re things that happen to one—
but no, you’re asking. And that penetrates
right to the bone and rattles like a saw.
Reproach, such as you might bear as a spirit,
bear against me when I withdraw myself
at night into my lungs, into my bowels,
into the last poor chamber of my heart,
such a reproach would not be half so cruel
as this mute asking. What is it you ask?
Say, shall I travel? Have you left somewhere
a thing behind you, that torments itself
with trying to reach you? Travel to a country
you never saw, although it was as closely
akin to you as one half of your senses?
I’ll voyage on its rivers, set my foot
upon its soil and ask about old customs,
stand talking with the women in their doorways
and pay attention when they call their children.
I will observe how they take on the landscape
outside there in the course of the old labor
of field and meadow; will express a wish
to be presented to the king himself,
and work upon the priests with bribery
to leave me lying before the strongest statue
and then withdraw, shutting the temple doors.
But in conclusion, having learnt so much,
I’ll simply watch the animals, that something
of their own way of turning may glide over
into my joints; I’ll have a brief existence
within their eyes, that solemnly retain me
and slowly loose me, calmly, without judgment.
I’ll make the gardeners repeat by heart
the names of many flowers and so bring back
in pots of lovely proper names a remnant,
a little remnant, of the hundred perfumes.
And I will purchase fruits too, fruits, wherein
that country, sky and all, will re-exist.
For that was what you understood: full fruits.
You used to set them out in bowls before you