The birds have flown their summer skies to the south,
And the flower-money is drying in the banks of bent grass
Which the bumble bee has abandoned. We wait for a winter lion,
Body of ice-crystals and sombrero of dead leaves.
A month ago, from the salt engines of the sea,
A machinery of early storms rolled toward the holiday houses
Where summer still dozed in the pool-side chairs, sipping
An aging whiskey of distances and departures.
Baton Rouge, 1940
These are savannas bluer than your dreams
Where other loves are fashioned to older music,
And the romantic in his light boat
Puts out among flamingos and water moccasins
Looking for the river that went by last year.
Even the angels wear confederate uniforms;
And when the magnolia blooms and the honeysuckle,
Golden lovers, brighter than the moon,
Read Catullus in the flaring light
Of the burning Negro in the open eye of midnight.
At two thousand feet the sea wrinkles like an old man’s hand.
Closer, in a monotone of peristalsis,
Its fugue-like swells create and recreate
One image in an idiot concentration.
From horizon to horizon, this desert
With the eye athirst for something stable
When off to southeast-ward —
It was a plane all right, or had been,
A shipside fighter, her pontoons floated her.
Smashed like a match-case, no one could be sure
If it were ours or had been one of theirs.
Sirs, when you are in your last extremity,
When your admirals are drowning in the grass-green sea,
When your generals are preparing the total catastrophe —
I just want you to know how you can not count on me.
I have ridden to hounds through my ancestral halls,
I have picked the eternal crocus on the ultimate hill,
I have fallen through the window of the highest room,
But don’ t ask me to help you ’ cause I never will.
We sat in the park, but there was a war between us,
A dead moon over us and all around us
The shy and secret whisperings as of the tiny
Woods animals which in the high forest gather
Wind-fallen goods before the frost comes.
All night long I hear the sleepers toss
Between the darkened window and the wall.
The madman’ s whimper and the lover’ s voice,
The worker’ s whisper and the sick child’ s call —
Knowing them all
I’ d walk a mile, maybe, hearing some cat
Crying its guts out, to throttle it by hand,
Such simple love I had. I wished I might —
Or God might — answer each call in person and
Each poor demand.
1.
Betrayed by his five mechanic agents, falling
Captive to consciousness, he summons light
To all its duties, and assumes the world
Like a common penance. Rust on the green tongue burns
Like history’ s corrosive on his living tree.
But all the monsters of his sleep’ s dark sea
Are tame familiars in the morning sun.
2.
It is autumn but early. No crow cries from the dry woods.
The house droops like an eyelid over the leprous hill.
In the bald barnyard one horse, a collection of angles
Cuts at the flies with a spectral tail. A blind man’ s
Sentence, the road goes on. Lifts as the slope lifts it.
Comes now one who has been conquered
By all he sees. And asks what — would have what —
Poor fool, frail, this man, mistake, my hero?
