De Rerum Natura: Proemium

Life giving and sustaining mother of men
And the race of gods, Rome’s progenitor stirring
The ocean whose palms shore ships
And Earth’s veins to sweeten our fruits,
Since it is your work that conceives the genus
Of every animate species born to see suns,
(The winds are winging before you,
The clouds that beckon your advent,
While the earth paints the water with lilies,
While the slopping of the sea grows still
And the pleasure of the sky reflects on light.)
...

Herodiade: Sketches #3

Add to this gems, sapphires and diamonds
Delicately paired, peerless crystals embedded
In metals whose precious eternity gleams
On a perishable thing, evoking the splendor
Of her youth, wise in its authority to bend
The thoughts of men, but also gay, also
Folly, since the sunlight sparkles
Hundreds of hues, split by the sober razor's
Promises into the leprechauns
Of dance, into a philosophy whose secrets
Hide in the vision's hidden ends.

Herodiade: Sketches #2

Lilies are white, so white! -- imagine
A candor as fair as would obscure
The colors of the light, washing out yellows,
Beaming down greys, and making green or red
Into things of dread. Now green is the emerald
Of the eyes, whose palpitations cannot touch
These pearls, this treasury of rising
Moons that brim over the tips, I mean
The cistern of her bleeding lips.

Heriodiade: Sketches #1

Her eyes not of lakes the lucid depth --
That would be a calm
So incisive as to know itself -- are the rush
Confounding silt upon the far shore,
Rather dragging mountains down
Valleys and lowering heights;

Yet this flow, her gaze,
So clear, that you can see
Each pebble it displaces,
Is as if an air.

A Piece of Advice (Leconte de Lisle)

Pour your life into the forest green, escalate
The mountainous nobility of heights, inhale
And, liberal at last from ancient service, flee
The bitter of remorse whose savor has
Your heart. Under the coursing dawn
March where you will, tread on
The rudest trails. Advance and go down
Into the solitary hidden
In the things you see.

Hurry!

But give ear to the rhythm of your course:
Because the wilderness moves in a confused
Enchantment and a muse
Sings the song of our source.

Midday

Is the majesty of summers, dragging his robe
Of incandescence through the yellow fields,
Whose blinding draught the children of the earth
Absorb with gaping mouth when not even a breeze
Can shudder in the glistered open sky. Men,
If you would die to life, raise your eyes too,
Drink in the light whose pulsing language licks
The afternoon.

After Leconte de Lisle

Tired

It doesn’t matter when you are tired:
The world just slips away.
It goes where everything goes when it fades.
It goes to the back of your mind.

There is an iron trellis and a plot of unmarked graves,
But that is not where the memories are hidden;
They are kept in a locked mausoleum, marble
Cylinder of circling light, and inside it is dark, it is quiet and dark.

I mean when you are tired the world becomes material –
You can only feel it as the light of conscience fades –
And heavy, and all a single weight pressing
At your eyes, and then you are too tired to say goodbye.

Esprit de Corps

Here there are only shapes. People,
Who makes things difficult,
Because they are so unpredictable
Or rather too unpredictably predictable
Are excised, as only their container remains.

It is the infinite sky, which is not all not at all air,
And in the depth of its highest heights
A deepening spectrum of blues...

-- But the shapes! Let us return to the shapes!

Cylinders of soot make chimneys, and there are red
Arrows at hexagonals of white-blood poles
Bearing up their signs to the streaking lines
Of the empty road. Bars the buildings’ windows close
By the steel of a garage resist, resist the ruddy brick.

You see how beautiful barren can be? And we
Are the lovers of form, the admirals of empty things.

Fire Engine (1870)

Each wheel has twenty spokes, whose rims
Are made of rubber, I suppose (although
It could be metal or more likely wood) –
The picture, as it is in gray, simply doesn’t say.

There are cogs and cylinders and chains, arranged
Correctly, that is, congruent to their purpose,
Even if that only means they appear as what I see.

The mystery in the machine is knowing its necessity:
These figures set together in their own transfiguration --
True, not the wheels in circumference if I push them,
Not even that they hold, but the structure that they hold:

The champagne steel, the bottle of perfume, the leather
Seat where the operator rides the reigns –
All the pipes and their circumlocutions following
The stately beast, finally the nozzles and the schemes
Through which the destiny of water leaks.

Reflection

Her face is the peach of a boy
In drag; she looks
Sullen, slightly.
“What’s wrong?”
Her husband frowns.

She has something to say and it's not
The pale rooves behind her or the trees
That tan in the opal of the day.

Its mystery is the bits
Of cloud in the clearing air:
A little bit of fluff stuck
In the gravity of thought.

In Memoriam

In three languages that is written
Whose progress is the Jew
Already lost in memory; a race
Of lords, the ancient Greeks;
And through the Romans’
Rex, whose firm prestige
Was their dominions’
Reach: (in English) it says
“Jesus Christ, the king…”

The nails stuck in his feet ooze
Through the dark of time
And all its infinite space,
From which a light shines
On the down-trod face,
Atop whose crown are laced
The trickling hairs.

Blood as in reproach
Encroaches on the pure,
White skin, the nipple
That has suffered sin –
But this is not a time for jokes.

Who was the man, that
Hanging by the nails,
Has nothing more to say?
Who is the man today?

Through the cold and the silence
A sign alone must speak:
He was “King of the Jews,
The Romans, and the Greeks.”

View of a River in Winter

The circle of our understanding turns
Like the windmill’s distant blades
(It is only perceived as
A meshwork of stenciled lines,
Colored reminiscences of an object
Thought). But more materially the clouds
Whose slow momentum is
The turbulent storm are lurching through
Disquieting appearances of blue.

Inspire Me

As I would inspire you: between us I would have
The golden chains of a hymn, linking us
In thought, binding our eyes to the same forms
By which the same words bound across –
Oh, if only they were the same lips!

But with you only vision conjoins me, and I see
The shapes upon your figure which my mind can trace
(The spiraling brown, penetrations of fingers, the hanging
Cloth and the lightly penciled arms) but will never touch.

What are you thinking in this moment that is not
The moment of my thoughts? Yours are far from me –
So far across the invisible distance
That I do not exist. "Look at me, look at me!"
Yes, if only you could see me:
If only you could see me as I'm seeing you.

Pickup Lines

You may not think you know me,
But rest assured: I know you. Yes,
Haven’t you seen me somewhere before?
It was just like this: I was sitting
By the door, the tip of my hat
Drawn down over my eyes –
And I looked right into yours.

Don’t be surprised.
I would say I’m the kind of guy
Who knows the look of things
And likes the thing he sees.
What do you see? To be sure
It’s only my first glass of beer –
Anyway, mostly foam: the bottle’s
Still pretty full. In fact –

Bartender, get me another glass.
See how it pours so smooth and clear
As amber? Here, take a sip; don’t worry.

After all, this one’s on me.

Is that a bear in the distance? No, it's just the trees...

Is that a bear in the distance? No, it’s just the trees.
These woods are haunted by the wind, whose strokes
Bring out the bird in bush. And wasn’t that something I heard,
“The still scream in the night, whether bird of prey or prey of…”?
Anyway it looks like a hungry god swooped down from on high,
Down from the heavens to carry off some mortal mouse –
Only now its image is mired in the earth like a growth, an aberration,
A monster. Certainly, these trees bear no fruit, only a ravenous green
Tinsel, which for decades has sucked all sap from the dirt,
And that is why there are no flowers, only patches of lean, dry grass.

"I will pay off the debt of habit"...

"I will pay off the debt of habit," I say to myself;
Saliva is sticking to the top of my throat, my heart
Strains at the stomach's load, eyelids trembling
On the tidings of the dawn. "Tomorrow
I will write the poem of my being once more, tomorrow
Shall live in the spirit of my flesh." The pounding
In my chest begins to slow, the room to blur
And fray: I think no more of whom I would clasp
And clasping me -- sated, I pour
Across the banks of sleep. For awhile numbers will flicker
On the shades, a phrase will echo through the corridors
Of the soul; but I will swallow once or twice,
Then blink -- and worm my way into the night.

In the Philosopher's Study

After Rembrandt

The heating fire's glow
Disperses the smoky air and fills
The tongs that prod
At the logs; by the foot of the stair

Its flicker frames a servant's
Face, streaks her rag-worn cape,
The wrinkled skin,
And eyes that have seen sin.

She hears a murmur interspersed
In the flow of the whisper that burns,
And shrugs, and turns: eyes half-closed,

His forehead bent, as if in thought,
The master nods. Sunlight streaming

In through the window dances
On the scowling walls and climbs
The bottom of the steps
And falls; it failed
Half-way between the floors:

It swerves and heads back out of doors.

Who are the women...

Who are the women
Picking flowers
From out of the dirt?

One is raising a high hand
As if to lecture and reproach
Her stooping niece, who
Still bending down, half-turns
Around. "Look!
Look up at the sky!"

"Soon it will rain,"
Their mistress calls
From the balcony,
"Come in."

Inside the banquet is already laid,
Inside the sumptuous table awaits --

But roses creep the far-side of the rocks,
White flowers sway in the tussle of winds.

Spring Village with Peach Blossoms

I sit by the dark patches of the shore and listen
For the curve of the line as it falls
Through flooding sways: I feel its extension
As a tension, as heightened premonitions
Of the water's laws -- nips and tugs
That cannot be so easily discerned
From trembling hands.

On the other side of the lake a boat
Is shrugging off the water's tide; peach trees
Growing by the bank are drizzling in the wind.

The air recalls a distance and the blue sky speaks
Of the showering sun, of the absence of rain.

Balance

I want to live variety, but
I am afraid -- strangers steal in
With difference and taint
The original, essence divides
And truths disperse, the flagellation
Of habit ceases with its wounds,
And all shape moves --
And all shape smoothes.