text: 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
  One 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 naivelyyet 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.
  
  O,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,
  We cannot frown upon her as she smiles,
  Dipping here in this cultivated storm
  Among slim skaters of the gardened skies.
  
  
         III
  
  Capped arbiter of beauty in this street
  That narrows darkly into motor dawn,
  You, here beside me, 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 fireno 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 Helens 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,
  O 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.