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FABLIAU OF FLORIDA
BARQUE of phosphor | |
| On the palmy beach, | |
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| Move outward into heaven, | |
| Into the alabasters | |
| And night blues. | 5 |
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| Foam and cloud are one. | |
| Sultry moon-monsters | |
| Are dissolving. | |
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| Fill your black hull | |
| With white moonlight. | 10 |
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| There will never be an end | |
| To this droning of the surf. | |
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HOMUNCULUS ET LA BELLE ETOILE
In the sea, Biscayne, there prinks | |
| The young emerald, evening star— | |
| Good light for drunkards, poets, widows, | 15 |
| And ladies soon to be married. | |
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| By this light the salty fishes | |
| Arch in the sea like tree-branches, | |
| Going in many directions | |
| Up and down. | 20 |
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| This light conducts | |
| The thoughts of drunkards, the feelings | |
| Of widows and trembling ladies, | |
| The movements of fishes. | |
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| How pleasant an existence it is | 25 |
| That this emerald charms philosophers, | |
| Until they become thoughtlessly willing | |
| To bathe their hearts in later moonlight, | |
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| Knowing that they can bring back thought | |
| In the night that is still to be silent, | 30 |
| Reflecting this thing and that, | |
| Before they sleep. | |
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| It is better that, as scholars, | |
| They should think hard in the dark cuffs | |
| Of voluminous cloaks, | 35 |
| And shave their heads and bodies. | |
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| It might well be that their mistress | |
| Is no gaunt fugitive phantom. | |
| She might, after all, be a wanton, | |
| Abundantly beautiful, eager. | 40 |
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| Fecund, | |
| From whose being by starlight, on sea-coast, | |
| The innermost good of their seeking | |
| Might come in the simplest of speech. | |
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| It is a good light, then, for those | 45 |
| That know the ultimate Plato, | |
| Tranquillizing with this jewel | |
| The torments of confusion. | |
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EXPOSITION OF THE CONTENTS OF A CAB
Victoria Clementina, negress, | |
| Took seven white dogs | 50 |
| To ride in a cab. | |
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| Bells of the dog chinked. | |
| Harness of the horses shuffled | |
| Like brazen shells. | |
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| Oh-hé-hé! Fragrant puppets | 55 |
| By the green lake-pallors, | |
| She too is flesh, | |
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| And a breech-cloth might wear, | |
| Netted of topaz and ruby | |
| And savage blooms; | 60 |
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| Thridding the squawkiest jungle | |
| In a golden sedan, | |
| White dogs at bay. | |
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| What breech-cloth might you wear— | |
| Except linen, embroidered | 65 |
| By elderly women? | |
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PLOUGHING ON SUNDAY
The white cock’s tail | |
| Tosses in the wind. | |
| The turkey-cock’s tail | |
| Glitters in the sun. | 70 |
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| Water in the fields. | |
| The wind pours down. | |
| The feathers flare | |
| And bluster in the wind. | |
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| Remus, blow your horn! | 75 |
| I’m ploughing on Sunday, | |
| Ploughing North America. | |
| Blow your horn! | |
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| Tum-ti-tum, | |
| Ti-tum-tum-tum! | 80 |
| The turkey-cock’s tail | |
| Spreads to the sun. | |
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| The white cock’s tail | |
| Streams to the moon. | |
| Water in the fields. | 85 |
| The wind pours down. | |
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BANAL SOJOURN
Two wooden tubs of blue hydrangeas stand at the foot of the stone steps. | |
| The sky is a blue gum streaked with rose. The trees are black. | |
| The grackles crack their throats of bone in the smooth air. | |
| Moisture and heat have swollen the garden into a slum of bloom. | 90 |
| Pardie! Summer is like a fat beast, sleepy in mildew, | |
| Our old bane, green and bloated, serene, who cries, | |
| “That bliss of stars, that princox of evening heaven!” reminding of seasons, | |
| When radiance came running down, slim through the bareness. | |
| And so it is one damns that green shade at the bottom of the land. | 95 |
| For who can care at the wigs despoiling the Satan ear? | |
| And who does not seek the sky unfuzzed, soaring to the princox? | |
| One has a malady here, a malady. One feels a malady. | |
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OF THE SURFACE OF THINGS
I In my room, the world is beyond my understanding; | |
| But when I walk I see that it consists of three or four hills and a cloud. | 100 |
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II From my balcony, I survey the yellow air, | |
| Reading where I have written, | |
| “The spring is like a belle undressing.” | |
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III The gold tree is blue. | |
| The singer has pulled his cloak over his head. | 105 |
| The moon is in the folds of the cloak. | |
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THE CURTAINS IN THE HOUSE OF THE METAPHYSICIAN
It comes about that the drifting of these curtains | |
| Is full of long motions; as the ponderous | |
| Deflations of distance or as clouds | |
| Inseparable from their afternoons; | 110 |
| Or the changing of light, the dropping | |
| Of the silence, wide sleep and solitude | |
| Of night, in which all motion | |
| Is beyond us, as the firmament, | |
| Up-rising and down-falling, bares | 115 |
| The last largeness, bold to see. | |
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THE PALTRY NUDE STARTS ON A SPRING VOYAGE
But not on a shell, she starts, | |
| Archaic, for the sea. | |
| But on the first-found weed | |
| She scuds the glitters, | 120 |
| Noiselessly, like one more wave. | |
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| She too is discontent | |
| And would have purple stuff upon her arms, | |
| Tired of the salty harbors, | |
| Eager for the brine and bellowing | 125 |
| Of the high interiors of the sea. | |
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| The wind speeds her, | |
| Blowing upon her hands | |
| And watery back. | |
| She touches the clouds, where she goes, | 130 |
| In the circle of her traverse of the sea. | |
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| Yet this is meagre play | |
| In the scurry and water-shine, | |
| As her heels foam— | |
| Not as when the goldener nude | 135 |
| Of a later day | |
| Will go, like the centre of sea-green pomp, | |
| In an intenser calm, | |
| Scullion of fate, | |
| Across the spick torrent, ceaselessly, | 140 |
| Upon her irretrievable way. | |
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