| |
| YOU too, America, have seen the hugeness of days | |
| Break with unguessed being out of the sullen past; | |
| To you the massive hour has called, | |
| Halting you amid random progress, | |
| Giving revelation, blasting, huge, of its being. | 5 |
| |
| Ungainly grandeur rises from your soil, | |
| Doom light stands above man’s dank shadow. | |
| Above wrangle, above hypocrisy, | |
| Light lifts its being, America, | |
| Hugely above you. . . . . . . . . | 10 |
| Terrible fluidities lurch through you, America. | |
| Blind, slathering, fluent, the liquid of passion | |
| Lifts you upon dark urgencies of being. | |
| |
| Tides move with terrible, unknowing will; | |
| Grim tides come from the sea | 15 |
| Lifting all upon the breast of being, holding all | |
| In the cruelty of oneness. The flood, | |
| The flood of being, the surge | |
| Of mobbed thought! The ebb, America, | |
| The ebb again! . . . . . . . . | 20 |
| The skin of time bursts with thick noises, | |
| Formless, spilling in huge, helpless flux. | |
| Gorged moments open with sodden split; | |
| The clog and glut build shapeless things. | |
| |
| Time lolls in unexpected disgorgement— | 25 |
| Release, heavy war, loosed inhibitions; the sullen flux | |
| Begins. All is overwhelming, limp, massive. | |
| |
| Where are the smooth Latin hours, | |
| Neat with emptiness, indifferent optimism? | |
| How has time debouched on unready men | 30 |
| These guttural, dizzy mists, | |
| This massive slime of being? . . . . . . . . | |
| Fulness lies across these lives | |
| In savage, self-created burden. Terrors | |
| Raise themselves hugely from the soul | 35 |
| Like the massive water of breakers. | |
| The inhuman, passionate quest rolls | |
| Monstrously across placid lives, building | |
| Immensity in staggered, foaming heaps. | |
| |
| Whence the blind utterness of these aggregations, | 40 |
| America? Who validates this load— | |
| Congested, heaving experience, discreet things, poured | |
| In immense preoccupation into the soul? | |
| Whence the massive utterness of circumstance? | |
| |
After Word
Where spaceless night rests upon the water | 45 |
| Can you find being: | |
| There a star wounds the liquid darkness | |
| With still, white stab; | |
| A ripple lifts its soft load of light, | |
| And returns to the fluid soul | 50 |
| Of the night water; | |
| Light sinks pervasively into the textures of darkness, | |
| Deep into the dusk of water; | |
| The being of light sifts into all its spaces; | |
| Light, ineffably its meaning | 55 |
| Fumes in fragrant faintness | |
| Amid drenching visions. | |
| |
