"And so we may arrive by Talmud skill And profane Greek to raise the building up Of Helen's house against the Ismaelite,
King of Thogarma, and his habergeons Brimstony, blue and fiery; and the force Of King A baddon, and the beast of Cittim;
Which Rabbi David Kimchi,
Onkelos,
And A ben Ezra do interpret Rome. "
HE
ST.
I The mind has shown itself at times Too much the baked and labeled dough Divided by accepted multitudes.
Across the stacked partitions of the day- Across the memoranda, baseball scores,
The stenographic smiles and stock quotations Smutty wings flash out equivocations.
The mind is brushed by sparrow wings;
Numbers, rebuffed by asphalt, crowd The margins of the day, accent the curbs,
Convoying divers dawns on every' corner To druggist, barber and tobacconist,
Until the graduate opacities of evening Take them away as suddenly to somewhere Virginal perhaps, less fragmentary, cool.
There is the world dimensional for those untwisted by the love of things irreconcilable… And yet, suppose some evening I forgot The fare and transfer, yet got by that way Without recall,-lost yet poised in traffic.
Then I might find your eyes across an aisle,
Still flickering with those prefigurations- Prodigal, yet uncontested now,
Half-riant before the jerky window frame.
There is some way,
I think, to touch Those hands of yours that count the nights Stippled with pink and green advertisements.
And now, before its arteries turn dark I would have you meet this bartered blood.
Imminent in his dream, none better knows The white wafer cheek of love, or offers words Lightly as moonlight on the eaves meets snow.
Reflective conversion of all things At your deep blush, when ecstasies thread The limbs and belly, when rainbows spread Impinging on the throat and sides Inevitable, the body of the world Weeps in inventive dust for the hiatus That winks above it', bluet in your breasts.
The earth may glide diaphanous to death;
But if I lift my arms it is to bend To you who turned away once,
Helen, knowing The press of troubled hands, too alternate With steel and soil to hold you endlessly.
I meet you, therefore, in that eventual flame You found in final chains, no captive then Beyond their million brittle, bloodshot eyes;
White, through white cities passed on to assume That world which comes to each of us alone.
Accept a lone eye riveted to your plane,
Bent axle of devotion along companion ways That beat, continuous, to hourless days- 0ne inconspicuous, glowing orb of praise.
II Brazen hypnotics glitter here;
Glee shifts from foot to foot,
Magnetic to their tremulo.
This crashing opera bouffe,
Blest excursion! this ricochet From roof to roof- Know,
Olympians, we are breathless While nigger cupids scour the stars!
A thousand light shrugs balance us Through snarling hails of melody.
White shadows slip across the floor Splayed like cards from a loose hand;
Rhythmic ellipses lead into canters Until somewhere a rooster banters.
Greet naively-yet intrepidly New soothings, new amazements That cornets introduce at every turn- And you may fall downstairs with me With perfect grace and equanimity.
Or, plaintively scud past shores Where, by strange harmonic laws All relatives, serene and cool,
Sit rocked in patent armchairs. 0,
I have known metallic paradises Where cuckoos clucked to finches Above the deft catastrophes of drums.
While titters hailed the groans of death Beneath gyrating awnings I have seen The incunabula of the divine grotesque.
This music has a reassuring way,
The siren of the ' springs of guilty song- Let us take her on the incandescent wax Striated with nuances nervosities That we are heir to: she is still so young,
She cannot frown upon her as she smiles,
Dipping here in this cultivated storm Among slim skaters of the gardened skies.
II Capped arbiter of beauty in this street That narrows -darkly into motor dawn,
You, here beside m/e, delicate ambassador Of intricate slain numbers that arise In whispers, naked of steel; religious gunman!
Who faithfully, yourself, will fall too soon,
And in other ways than as the wind settles On the sixteen thrifty bridges of the city:
Let us unbind our throats of fear and pity.
We even,
Who drove speediest destruction In corymbulous formations of mechanics,- Who hurried the hill breezes, spouting malice Plangent over meadows, and looked down On rifts of torn and empty houses Like old women with teeth unjubilant That waited faintly, briefly and in vain:
We know, eternal gunman, our flesh remembers The tensile boughs, the nimble blue plateaus,
The mounted, yielding cities of the air!
That saddled sky that shook down vertical Repeated play of fire-no hypogeum Of wave or rock was good against one hour.
We did not ask for that, but have survived,
And will persist to speak again before All stubble streets that have not curved To memory, or known the ominous lifted arm That lowers down the arc of Helen's brow To saturate with blessing and dismay.
A goose, tobacco and cologne- Three winged and gold-shod prophecies of heaven,
The lavish heart shall always have to leaven And spread with bells and voices, and atone The abating shadows of our conscript dust.
Anchises' navel, dripping of the sea,- The hands Erasmus dipped in gleaming tides,
Gathered the voltage of blown blood and vine;
Delve upward for the new and scattered wine, 0 brother-thief of time, that we recall.
Laugh out the meager penance of their days Who dare not share with us the breath released,
The substance drilled and spent beyond repair For golden, or the shadow of gold hair.
Distinctly praise the years, whose volatile Blamed bleeding hands extend and thresh the height The imagination spans beyond despair,
Outpacing bargain, vocable and prayer.
