JOSHUA TREES FREDERICK MORTIMER CLAPP *--^i 7- Class, ^^ *-4 Boofc_ri w> f V '^^v,;;:::? ^ 'Z 1. Copyiiglit'N?- COPyRIGHT DEPOStr. JOSHUA TREES JOSHUA TREES BY FREDERICK MORTIMER CLAPP BOSTON MARSHALL JONES COMPANY 1922 •^"p V'\.^ By the Same Author POETRY On the Overland New York and Other Verses PROSE Les dessins de Pontormo Jacopo Carucci History of 17th Aero Squadrok Copyright, 1922, by Marshall Jones Company Printed in the United States of America DEC -4 '22 CU692231 CONTENTS Page Bloom on the Desert's Edge 3 Archeology 4 Still Life 5 Contact 6 Venetian Gulls 7 The Monkey Cage 9 California; The Hills of Bolinas 11 Crucifixion 12 Arizona 13 Revulsion 14 Cuckoos 15 Quince Blossoms 16 Light 17 Survivals 18 Once More the Pathetique 19 Query to the Lord of Light 20 The Explorer 21 To THE Disembodied Intelligence 23 A Spring Song for California 24 Gramophone Solo 25 . Versus 26 A Stylist 27 Revolutionaries 28 Windless Rain 29 Circular Fans 30 Byzantine Mosaics 31 Postponement 34 Peace 35 Suburban Twilight 37 Announcing a Dissolution Sale 38 Costa Scarpuccia 39 Requiem 41 Otherness 42 To A Bivalve 43 Marionettes 44 Words 46 JOSHUA TREES BLOOM ON THE DESERT'S EDGE DAWN inks in the saw-toothed foothills against its nickel glare; and, like the tail end of a flare, a handful of stars drag their light through the spikes of a Joshua tree and sink out of sight. Night flattens and thickens ; and noiselessly working, like a mind full of dreams, spectral exhalations wind with wool the acacias' fish-bone leaves. Time heaves and lies dead still an instant's eternity. Everything waits. Everything listens. Chill stillness fills everything like the shadow of a great wing. A patch of alkali glistens. And fiercely the sun clears the foothills and the sky is mercury hissing with mirage where it eats into the land, and the air is yellow with acacias in full bloom. Napoleon's thoughts before Jena must have come like this. [3] ARCHEOLOGY CANGRANDE, Gran Podestade di Verona, they have pried up the lid of your sarcophagus because it is now the sixth centenary of your shabby friend Dante — you remember? — him whom Florence deported and who said he had walked through Hell yet found your stairs so steep. And Cangrande you are a heap of musty rags to the camera's hard eye, a hunched muddle of rags and bones like the striker they potted on B Street, Tolusa, in a recent riot. . . . They photographed him too where he lay for the Sunday paper. And they have taken out of your hawklike right hand your long sword of state, all jewels and fine gold, and put it into a glass box with a brief exact label — name and date, length and weight. Ah, Cangrande di Verona, Grandissima Podestade! [41 STILL LIFE TO withdraw impassive upon myself until the scattered beady quicksilver of thought, mingling, make my consciousness a mirror where all things will enter, but none remain; to assume my selfness completely by a contraction that envelops and yet rejects all otherness — this would be to become a flower. There is no other birth into perfection. Anemones, black-hearted paper-fine anemones, I have found this out seeing your white, purple, red reflected in the untroubled reality of a looking-glass. But what are you doing in this old bronze pot on my table? Your stems are as pale and sinuous as a shepherd's melody. Come, let us dance together; it is spring, and I have attended the obsequies of all my desires. |5I CONTACT A CRACKLING spark, ear-splitting, rips between the polished poles of your whining static machine, oscillating like a whipped rapier. So we have rushed upon one another licking through the dry tension of emotion. And the air stings and rings with the stimulation and clarity of ozone. We have rechemicalized the circumambient. [61 VENETIAN GULLS TO-DAY they have come in from the sea, the pearl-grey gulls with white throats, white tails, and wings edged with frills of foam. The green canal water, harassed in its hunger for tranquillity by the worry and bubble of many oars and keels, lies fitted in between somnolent palaces like a finely chiseled pavement of Chinese jade. The hard oblique light falls clearer than flawless glass, cutting out pink roofs and high pink towers flat against the sky ; and, wheeling and skimming through it, on wings frilled with the white of foam, pearl-grey gulls fly in straining, ascending and descending spirals, over green water irised into its depths with reflections of crumbling brick and age-ivoried marble. Skimming, wheeling, wheeling, skimming, they fly over limpid jade-green water and its furling, unfurling, irised shadows that have rinsed out of the backward-slipping centuries insinuations of yellowing lace, purple figs, flaked gilt, pomegranates, and frost-flushed creeper leaves where summer still smoulders. The gulls fly in parabolas and hyperbolas, ellipses and cycloids, flapping hungrily with a peevish sharp cry. ['T] They swirl, sweeping past empty round-arched windows, empty gothic windows, empty flamboyant windows, and the rusty iron-work and lank slimy seaweed of water gates. They swoop past rain- washed balustrades of porphyry balconies, squealing down on to floating shadows of delicate solemn palaces. Dangling their red feet they swoop and hover over inverted shadowy palaces that melt and spread like heavy oils on the canal's deep green. It is bitterly cold for early October and watching the gulls from my window I am filled with an imprisoned vague desolation. Hungry intentions swirl through me in petulant spirals and flapping hyperbolas — unattained projects driven in, at the year's end, from sea beaches of life that free and changing tides have swept clean. Improvident intentions veer about in me whirling whirring wings, as they settle down over lingering irised reflections in my mind of other men's delicate and solemn achievements. The flawless light of Autumn's reality stares at a world narrowed to a prison, under this high pearl-grey layer of unbroken clouds, where the gulls peevishly crying have come in famished from the sea. [8] THE MONKEY CAGE THE mind seeks liberation but seeking grasps tighter the bars of incarnation staring into the misty hypothesis, and reahty is a moment furtively lucid between dreams. (This is too technical.) * 'Please do not feed or annoy the animals." The mind seeks liberation, but few can make an exit unobserved, and the King of Dahomey has many spiritual relations who live in palaces of skulls. (This is too poetical.) Give me strength on this foggy morning, when all the pyramidal pines are as flat and flimsy as black and white drop-curtains easy to lunge through, and the live oaks, hugging one another, are immense toadstools black-purple on the blue mist — nothing to knock over; give me strength to make something out of the ice-cold iron I have been tugging at. Shall I twist it like a hairpin and make an instrument to measure a star? Shall I brain an enemy with it? Shall I flail out the seed of tribulation into penance and a slave's salvation? Or praise God on a vertical trapeze putting Swedish gymnastics into another dimension? The spectators in sleazy bowler hats — white mouths and goggle eyes, [9] like codfish nosing about a tank- gulp each other's excrement, and gleefully flap about admiring my captive nudity. [10] CALIFORNIA: THE HILLS OF BOLINAS WIND racing inland pawing the sea into creeping scallops — heavy-winged, galloping wind, half horse, half bird — you bound and bump against the drooping belly of the clouds, you stumble scrambling inland into the steep Sierra. And the yellow hills like heaps of half -empty balloons sag back from the beach in crumples, puff up in bulges, and shuddering drag at their moorings. Wind out of Asia, why are your feet so fierce upon these hills? — you who have come from the Harp-playing Defile and tawny Omei-shan, you who have spoken to the pines of Miajima and counted the yellow nets on the beach at Suruga? [11] CRUCIFIXION DISPASSIONATELY I spit my thoughts Hke flies on a pin because by their buzzing they keep reminding me it was love, without which nothing lives, imprisoned me here that I might know how beautiful and all-merciful love is and how nothing matters but love — me nailed up, as a joke, high between sparkling Virgo and Sagittarius with the steady leaking and waste of my days dripping like water on to my skull. [12] ARIZONA THESE wind-corroded mountains of malachite and steatite and azurite, of zinc and mica and feldspar, and dry as buried bones and arid as salt crystals in an oven — O holy land where nothing is that's holy, where nothing lives but mine prospectors' stakes, indulger and betrayer of passions withering and fierce as your suii. . . . Now grim John and his locusts are an unrolled scroll to me, and the Lamb of God, the Boddhi Tree and Mecca. Listen, there is something screaming like a scalded baby, listen, the desert jackal; and dawn whisks the crawling stars out of heaven like a scooping hand catching flies on an oil-cloth table. Lamb of God, 1 am homesick, and men in their cities are less to me than tumble-weed bounding across the dry slime of dead lakes. The Lord will overwhelm their cities with sand ; the true God will bury their cities utterly. But the flute and the drum and the masked dance of His ritual shall endure. His revelation shall endure like the mica and feldspar of these wind-corroded mountains; and it shall not be for nothing that more a friendless exile than once in Galilee or Araby He tramps about this country. [13] REVULSION THIS afternoon my life came out of its lurking place underground, its two-mouthed gopher hole, and squeaked at me. Looking up, with its tiny eyes beady and spiteful, it winced, it squeaked at me. What am I? — the little, bare, rain-pitted mound nosed up at the mouth of its hole ? What am I? — the wind's erotic finger wound like an idiot girl's round a sun- stricken wild flower on its burrow's edge? Or the rotting rain splitting open the toadstool of my knowledge and leaving it stinking and yellow? But what does it matter what I think I am, or whether I made it or it made me, when my life has squeaked at me with spiteful eyes? I know, I know. ... It has nibbled in the dark the roots of bitter weeds. But then that is its nature. I'll go and make friends with the porcelain-faced odalisque who grins shoving out butter pats in Boos Bros.' cafeteria. [14] CUCKOOS PEOPLE of parchment in beautiful villas, your gardens' light and shade plays at chess with the sun; and on their own tails intent your peacocks parade down a lichened balustrade. Perennial flowers unfold hearing the grit of your feet on this gravel path. Your gardeners are very wise and old. But your villas' vaulted rooms' array and your crocuses and stocks are an aftermath of long ago and far-away that keeps you alive while it mocks. A warm wind rocks your fountain's jet yet you grow cold. Weary people of parchment with an eye, ringed round with wrinkles, that twinkles malicious hunger with itself at strife, once did it make your heart leap, this unfading beauty — once, when you paid for it with a sigh and turned your back on life, once, before years into many years had slipped by irretraceable degrees? You have made your nest in the remorseless eternity of beauty. I. . . . Ah, the seeds of a dream's perpetuity are too cheap in Italy for me. [15] QUINCE BLOSSOMS OUT of your leafless stem, five-petaled quince, your pistil a pearl, your stamens a little yellow sheaf, burst in perfection now the night that disimprisons you comes. I am weary of men and their folly and of my own folly, and my days are empty of elation, and my thoughts — I wince at them remembering them. Ah, but pure the delight with which I curl the caress of my eyes around your clusters, flower sudden as revelation and unearthly as second sight. [16] LIGHT LIKE a runner running over a starlit plain -^ breathless, with clenched hands, wildly, for fear of the sardonic quietness of the stars, when the wasted hills settling down into their deep composure whisper to one another, under the slow rotation of the sky, when the still night air is cold in his mouth. . . . Take not away from me, in my breathless running through the darkness with clenched fingers and bruised feet — take not from me, you smiling and scornful immensities, the agonizing light behind my blind eyes — take not away from me flight. Look! I am only a crazed runner running over a starlit plain wildly, aimlessly, with the cold of death in my mouth, running, running breathless through my own mania for fear of the sardonic quietness of your eternal stars. [17] SURVIVALS EVERYWHERE there is something hanging by a thread all over the world: bits of loose plaster caught, twisting with the wind in spiders' webs, high up on scaling old walls ; fruit, leaves, and seeds that would slip from their dry stems in the faintest stir of this deep-sleeping Autimin air; old houses that would crumble if you let a window slam ; old ships that would sink if a tired sea-gull lighted on their rail; cliffs that a beetle's pincers, nipping a spear of grass, would topple over into peaceful valleys; avalanches that wait to rumble down only the melting of one point of one snowflake's crushed six-pointed star; bodies, stiffening with death's stoniness, held up on a will to live over the grave; dead ideas, like stuffed birds on a rusty wire, all dust and rumpled feathers, still turning in some draughty hallway of the mind, simulating flight; the earth itself still counterpoised on its own dying spinning in space — all that absolving time in its hurry overlooks •everywhere lifelessly clinging to life, in the midst of death's luniversal tender loosening into peace. [18] ONCE MORE THE PATHETIQUE I LISTENED again, after years, to music that once like a sea wind blew clean the summits of my mind. I listened, cloudy with seasons of Himalayan mists sticking to the roof of my world, and oh so much more than ever in need of that revelation. But, wedged in among hundreds of faces, rows on thick expectant rows of them, I became a stone-cold Laocoon crawled over by the coiling and uncoiling of scaly sounds. Some one other than myself used my eyes to watch the conductor sweat. Some one other than myself was sickened by the breath of a much-moved woman behind me. And I ran up through an interminable black tunnel towards a tiny vent-hole of light. Curses on the multiplication table! [19] QUERY TO THE LORD OF LIGHT T^AINICHI, your hands clasped ^^ in the gesture of the union of mortahty with the infinite, making the symbol of the five senses closing upon wisdom clearer than the heart of a diamond. . . . Dainichi, light of the world, the gilt flakes off your golden body; flake by flake it chips off and falls into the stone-rimmed pool below your altar. And the gold fish wake out of their cold dreams ; they think they see the wings of a dead butterfly ; they dart upon them like streaks of sunlight ; they fight about the flakes of the bright body of your immeasurable wisdom; and their churning tails leave tiny eddies and ripples on the pool. O Illuminator, how comes the phantom of hunger to lurk so untamed in the shadow of your light? [20] THE EXPLORER HIS brittle hands let a pale rosiness through from the fire as he passed them over his white beard, and the skin on his skull over a puckered bushiness of brows brought back to me the feeling of an ivory I have often had in my hands — a stained figure of a Christ caressed by who will ever say how many lips. So when he told me how he explored alone Lake Nyassa a long, long lifetime ago, scaling the snow-capped chain of Marununga's peaks that stand around it and plunge toothed shadows into the sun-devoured gold of its rippleless immensity, I no longer felt he was sitting there, fragile and old beside me. I only heard his quiet voice. And through my mind lithe black men, nude, bronze-glossy, full of held-in swiftness, crawled on all fours, with big white watchful eyes, through mango thickets, beyond Ayanga and Makanga, serpent-wise, in fear of cruel gods, cruel chiefs, cruel enemies. And deep behind my eyes clusters of blooms, obscenely poisonous, hung from a woven dome of mulando boughs, strangled and stifling with the stench of decay. I saw blue-faced baboons with scarlet buttocks and lecherous tails slinking through silver reeds [21] in the heron-haunted Morambala marshes; and luridly, through the listless air — green, red, black, yellow, strident streaks they seemed — great birds screamed over me, settling like gossamer down the livid half-light on gorgeous, unfluttered, outspread plumes. I felt the crushing sun's heat on a thatch of swamp -fattened leaves, while the jungle snapped and shivered at something squirming its way down to the molten gold of the lake. And through it all I kept hearing drums of ebony beating through a steady throb of beaten drums beating through a thick, ecstatic pulse of deeper drums, while an unsteady flute spilled, like a rivulet of sulphur creeping through the dark, a trickle of gasping melody that turned upon itself and coiled and suddenly set free a shuffling of soft feet and wriggle of bare flesh and jiggle of black breasts in rites more ancient than the jungle is. Till on the tum-tum, tum-tum-tum, and unending flicker of the flute I felt the jeweled pinion of my brain, on which my thoughts revolve, spin into giddiness. For there was something, behind me, beside me, above me, so soaked and soaked again and steaming with life, something so dark and teeming with existence that the naked black men's naked fear put its damp fingers into my heart. . . . Then looking up I saw him stroking in a revery his white beard and speaking like one who has forgotten that he speaks. [ 22 ] TO THE DISEMBODIED INTELLIGENCE /^H quickly ^^ out of your polar seclusion where, by spinning on your heel scornfully, you have often reversed the motion of the stars . . . quickly — this cane-brake is swarming with lascivious pigmies. I have known in what nothingness consists. Obliterate my apartness in the benediction of your basilisk eyes. There can be between us now no side considerations, no vicious charity. What if once I did stupidly think there was a secret kinship between myself and forgotten idols? [23] A SPRING SONG FOR CALIFORNIA A TOMTIT'S cheep, addressed -^^ to the gurgle of the creek, flits sharp as a httle crotchet's hook jotted carelessly oblique in a new blank-book. This season's pullets have begun to sit. The gruntings of a saxophone intone with unregarding glee someone's opulent vacuity too long suppressed. A punted football's twirls loop up and droop into a crook'd arm. The sunshine is blue as an arc light, and the swirls of the hill's edge through it delight even me. Now moment after moment limpidly laps against me like a warm ripple and yields gayly its tether on eternity to another. A violent cyclamen stares in a red pot. The marble clouds pile up and file away behind the trees complacently. The rains have passed like naked girls running at dawn over fallow fields. The ground is soft as a cheese to spade and bursting buds shake a cannonade over ants gone mad on their army affairs, while local architects swing and smile in swivel chairs. [24] GRAMOPHONE SOLO FINGERING a tune on my clarionet I burned a village of wooden shacks — these melodious attacks are more insidious than they seem. Yet people look for lightning in their music — the flash that will short-circuit their emotions through me! Then they go shouting, "Firebug! Firebug!" Engine of our inspiration (And how like a thing beset it spins fearfully ; look, and the spark of it how it skims and skips!), engine, before your hum acts like a drug and still more mixed our metaphors become, intimate, intimate to me what makes you make me squeeze a melody through the tube of a clarionet and hold it like elixir to their lips when where it drips it burns — since fire is the liquid of the voice of any bird and crematory to the common herd? [25] . VERSUS . ELECTION Day. The sky-blue plumbago basks, a motionless wave of bloom, under this dry exhilarating California sun. Ford cars, buzzing like clocks that have lost their balance-wheels, deliver eggplants, polished and purple, and white ranch eggs stuck in cardboard pigeon-holes. A gramophone grits its teeth over a jazz. Crack ! They are playing baseball in the lot next door. Election Day ! And which shape of straw will the befuddled giant choose this time to jiggle on jocose thumb at his puppet-show, while Europe, in her dotage, looks up, incredulous, lacrymose. expecting — surely not another Messiah! Election Day. My newspaper crinkles and smells like a sawmill as, open-mouthed, I skim over the last exhortations of frantic and unselfish candidates. Crack! They are playing ball in the lot next door — J, ea-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-ay Surely not already the Messiah! The plumbago basks in the still sun, scentless and sky-blue. [26] A STYLIST SELF-SUFFICIENT and shut in upon myself I thought I could hold words on to the grindstone of my imagination, so firm, so long, that with the fine edge of their subtlety I could, when the moment came, chip imperishable figures out of the unquarried ledges of my life. How many years have been sucked up into my stone's whirling and lost in the gush of its winking sparks! How many years — while the shapes I was going to chisel have faded out of my mind. Faded completely. And now I have it in my hands, this whetted instrument, what am I to do with it hacking and hewing at shadows that mocking hack and hew at me? Ouf, the cliff sculptures of Tibet and China! [27] REVOLUTIONARIES T^O bring down suddenly and utterly, -■" as an earthquake would, the rotting edifice where Faith has been walled up in incest with the shadow of her fear for centuries and centuries, to burn the rags of Faith's diseases and her rusty irons in a vision's smokeless flame — ^this was their dream, when Thought (who knew the purging of his parents' incest would make a beggar of him on the public streets) in their ear whispered a syllable that gave again to their mortal eyes a pregnant sight . . . while treacherously caressing the wayward flower-flame of their vision he tore loose from eternity the slim deep roots of its light. [28] WINDLESS RAIN RAIN at dawn on the tiles of Venice, ' a soft straight steady shpping down of rain; water mistily passing into water with a diffused hush. Not another sound in the city, no lapping of waves, no knocking together of boats. Everything sleeping. I look out and watch the rain, until the silence of the low misty clouds and the silence of the sleeping city, and the inner silence into which all my thoughts have been sucked up cling to one another with the chill caressing gesture of the Three Graces, the delicate Lesbian goddesses of the cathedral library of dry Siena. I see them projected from the magic lantern of my mind against the impalpable unbroken background of the rain. ... Mesmerizing sound of rain on canal water — There is a shadowless beginning of light now everywhere ; but at the corner of Calle Lanza and Calle San Gregorio lamplight is yellow still on grey walls. [29] CIRCULAR FANS THE perimeters of the minds of most people, how quickly you can measure them ! — two carved or painted little sticks of environment and heredity laid face to face, and when with the bright smile of an idea you open them, turning them through their full orbit, when carefully laying them back to back you fasten the gilt clasp of their prejudice, there outspread, the pleated complete circle of their intelligence : a low moon scratched across by river reeds perhaps ; a humble doorway into daily tribulations ; some emblematic holy figure. . . . Fan yourself! How will you ever stir otherwise this torpid air? [30] BYZANTINE MOSAICS GESTICULATION and laughter and bombardment of flowers beside this deep blue sea, under this deep sea-blue sky. The chattering crowd falls greedily on its moment — the living promiscuous crowd living out its living desires. It is the feast of the Most Holy and Immaculate Virgin, the compassionate, the interceding. The swirling frivolity of thousands of faces gurgles around me lapping into my eyes with bright provocative ripples. But, turned in upon myself, I remember that, in the twilight of crumbling apses, I have seen recognition in fixed inhuman eyes and something invisible to others pass over their expression as I have gazed up at half-obliterated figures tall and very frail and loaded down with all the sapphires and emeralds of imperial treasuries. Ascetic and cruel and cadaverous women cancerous with defeat and an empire's decrepitude, insane and exquisite and inquisitive women silent with the poison of an impassive voluptuousness and full of ruinous understanding, we have understood one another without intercession or compassion. And how should I not be a stranger at flower festivals among these children of barbarians, when in my mind you linger [31] enduring without a gesture the gleaming functions and tedious last rites of plague-depopulated capitols? The obscurity and falling away of dead time is bridgeless between us. And you will never come back again to this impoverished world where only paltry and tawdry counterfeits, like these tinseled village girls made up as queens, enthroned while the procession lasts from city gate to city gate, parade in pasteboard cars of triumph. I have looked into your great fixed eyes and seen the end of life like a little light floating far-off on the edge of the sea at night. You have turned upon yourselves and, cold and distracted, you watch your erudite and sycophantic priests move imperturbable through yet another incense-stifled cycle of senseless ritual, while Scythians and Bulgarians paw at the gates. O frail and pitiless and aching under your crushing, gem-encrusted tunics, we have understood one another; we are heavy and helpless with understanding. And yet a worm of envy works his file-like tongue on the quick of me. To feel my heart flutter up with exaltation like a peasant boy's [ 32 ] watching his love as queen of the festival ride by billowy with mosquito net and drawn by plodding plough horses! Or to jeer and be full of the joy of jeering familiar, thoughtless, unwounding, like these village people when she kisses her hands at them with the jerky movement of a manikin. [33] POSTPONEMENT T^HROUGH the rock crystal of my silence -■■ run silver flaws; unsung songs beating against it have cracked with fine fissures the globe of my silence, and the knife-thin ray of inner light with which I probe into the future splinters along them into ghostly spectra. If only I had put out my hand when they flew hard into the deceiving crystal, as bewildered birds fly into the light, I should not now, in this darkness, be wrapped and wrapped, like an unrisen Lazarus, in all these swathing ribbons of rainbows. [34 1 PEACE COME, my own, let us steep ourselves in beauty, for in the world no sacrifice avails, no purity avails or holiness. They walked in the flame of death as into sunlight, and they made themselves for others the inner flame of life— they are dead and the names of them, who will remember ? They have fallen among obscene shadows that have quenched the burning of their vision, shadows piled up, ages deep, by dead lust, dead greed, around them dead and around us living, shadows full of insatiable teeth and padded paws that prowl, betrayals, trafficking, plottings, money-changing. The beasts of the thickets of money and power — they have bartered the ashes of their bones, they have sold their unnameable martyrdom and passion, they have traded in the divine trance of their utter devotion, they have made of their death a trap with which to way- lay us. Come, my own, let us steep ourselves in beauty, for it alone has in it no root of corruption, for it alone is consolation; be it only the resonance fallen mysteriously on a word, the morning's unfolding or the night's restoring transfigurations, the laughter of a child, the singing of a bird, the quiver of a leaf — be it only this tragic and imprisoned and tumultuous heart of yours, or be it only now at last, [35] only the tender gesture of understanding, long lacking, with which I look into your mind, and you look deep down into mine and bring me peace. [36] SUBURBAN TWILIGHT IN'TO the thickening dusk I carried the dusk of my alien mind. Silence congealed on the cement sidewalks speculators have scratched across empty fields. Here and there a human fly buzzed in a ready-made house. The sign posts were as meaningless and askew as my thoughts — "Paradise Point, Tract P 3, Panoramic Way." This, I said, is an iniquity of drawing paper and India ink, a calculation, a diagram, a zoological garden of logic and lust. The silence was like a blue jelly and, as I walked, it quivered into a blear piping, a shrill throbbing. It was as if all the memories of my childhood sitting around the puddle of unconsciousness, began whimpering. I listened, thinking to myself, "At least there still are frogs." Then I passed a popcorn peddler's cart, and the little whisk of steam from his whistle, spiffling drearily, blew away white into the unlighted night. [37] ANNOUNCING A DISSOLUTION SALE ^'DEATITUDE. •■^ This article goes to the bargain counter Friday. A limited supply from our own agent in the Elysian Fields. Assorted. Guaranteed. First come, first served. No orders C. O. D. will be received. 100,000,000 samples have been sold. The price is right and cut down to the quick. Sacrifice! These goods for while they last. Our motto -monogram on every package: 'To him that hath.' Shop early. Bring your friends." (Galvanic arms and hands knock over the salesmen waving paper money sticky with sweat and blood. The cash register chokes.) I put my face against the plate-glass door, but seeing the exaltation of the mob I saunter to a graveyard that I know to hum love-songs and study epitaphs, (This form of piety repays a rhetorician.) while dandelions, sprinkled through the grass, make mimic maps of prehistoric heavens. [38] COSTA SCARPUCCIA THROUGH the lit mist that flows low under the night sky like a silver dust-cloud over the city, nine orange lights on an unseen hill — nine orange street lamps of Fiesole alive with a faint twinkling in the black stillness mimicking the constellation of Cassiopeia setting. I carry my mind like a falcon asleep on my wrist, and it does not peel the thin wrinkled skin from its eye as I wander down the steep flagged gorge of this silent old street. Like a falcon chained with a fine gold chain my mind sleeps, drooping its predatory wings. And, fearless of startling it into flight, I look up and see all the thoughts and desires, like my own, that have made men make the city, hewing it, year in year out, day in day out, with weary chisels out of cold stones, carving it slowly in the image of their fate enfeoffed to the cruel wings of their dreams. I look up and see, under the nine far-away orange street lamps of Fiesole laid against the hill like Cassiopeia setting, the everliving races of the birds of divination and hope where they sit in a brooding rookery on the edge of shadows that hang from jutting roofs of banks, shops, bureaus, hotels, houses — bald, old vultures with hunched-up, shoulder bones, and hoary, bedraggled owls, [39] and ruffled, river-haunting cranes — their claws clenched tight on rain-smoothed cornice gutters, their beaks thrust under their wings. I look up and see them and my falcon mind sinks its talons deep into my wrist. [40] REQUIEM The birth of an essentially American art is momentarily expected. — Radio Broadcast. IARYA in a steel-blue crevice -^ under hills of ice, strange speck-embodied pain of coming wings too delicate for flight, insect, why are you trying to be born in this Switzerland not garnished yet with lepidopterists ? I see by your feeble pulsations you feel a lost ray of the sun come crawling over the glacier of recorded fact. Ah, but will nothing reverse the useless cycle of your fated becoming? This shadowy dawn is fallacious. Already as a worm (much less as painted death-moth or ghostly dragon-moth) you are too . . . old! [41] OTHERNESS T T is so silent here I cannot think. -■• An oak leaf's clicking fall denudes my mind of continuity ; and the ringlet waves of putting the twos and twos of life together lap backwards over one another and die out into this silence like a wind's breath held in over a pool. I see the crooked image of a bough, the flickering of a butterfly; and bending nearer over myself I put my face down and feel the chill of otherness creep over my eyes. [42] TO A BIVALVE CREATURE of accretions, at noon, under the sea water's pale-green half night, half day, grain by grain you are making for yourself a wall of rainbows secretly out of the dark, swaying sea. Yet what can you know of fabulous signs and promises arched red, purple, blue, binding sudden rifts of serene sky to the scudding foam — you, when the foot of their arch is set on the edges of the world, you — bubbles, a little, wobbling, up -striving stream black over, silver under, the breadth of your mouth? Turn inward your dreams, O my spirit. Let the inside even of your rebellion be a rainbow better to you than many-colored, far-away, false hopes. Look, these millions of upturned faces distorted with anguish — waiting for the miracle! Look, these millions of fixed eyes ashen with disillusion! [43] MARIONETTES At the sun-silvered far end of the empty square, -^"^ their backs to me, they walk side by side, shoulders and hips just touching; they are both in black, and her slanted bright parasol covers their inclined heads like a little green dome. I see them stop, and his arm, extended in its black sleeve ending in a white hand, makes twice a gesture, an appeal. They walk on again crossing a blue polygon of shadow fallen askew from the grey corroded front of an ancient church. They loiter where the joints of the flags of the sun-silvered square converge. I do not know who they are, and from my window they seem now hardly an inch high. Yet in the clear depths of my introspection I see, sharp from their feet, diverging beyond them far out, year behind year, a crowded perspective interpenetrating like a diorama the sunny walls of the old square's houses. Something has dropped out of eternity into time. And I feel the shimmering waters of their trance suck me under [ 44 ] into a stillness where the stars are lit at midday. They saunter on again. No wonder her tilted parasol is shot with the dye of spring's unfolding tenderest leaves. [45] WORDS FROM high up among interwoven branches that make black rivers against my mind's moonhght, words let go of their chilled twigs and spinning drift downward through the inner stillness of my meditation. And they are miraculous words like the words of incantations. What can they ever be to me these heaps of leaves the keepers of gardens and graves have raked up crinkling beside the crowded highway? Would I be a wind to blow them into the pitiable faces of hurrying travelers ? Would I stoop with the flame of a match to set them smouldering for the sake of the blue-white column of smoke rooted in their decay and twisting like a waterspout into the clouds? Would I dim the eyes of those who do not see the end of their journey with the gusty eddies and rustle of prophecy? Would I deceive these crawling convoys creaking through the desert from one bondage into another with a pillar of smoke? The flash and hurrying clamor of the highway ; the unceasing rumble of its wheels ; the unresting pattering and shuffle of feet ; and out of the moonlit silver plains and black rivers of my mind, sifting downward through the sacred stillness of my meditation, magic unavailing words. [46] Deacidified using the Bookkeeper proc Neutralizing agent: Magnesium Oxide Treatment Date; Sept. 2009 PreservationTechnolog A WORLD LEADER IN COLLECTIONS PRESERV/ 1 1 1 Thomson Park Drive Cranberry Township, PA 16066 (79A\ 77q.?111 LIBRARY OF CONGRESS ^im 012 243 0716 Q