Byword

The more you’d strike, the more you must strike out;
Still, keep the fingers busy with the page:
The leaves of verse are only turned by age.

Release

I hope that it soon will take me,
Wring me out and place me
At the mercy of dozing strains
Until the voice of shivering
Dawn awakes me, and my body
Is sinewed fresh, and I feel it
In my flesh.

Dark thing, you are about
The valleyed fur, the
Hills’ recline: so
Whisper your eyes and bat
The evening’s lash,
Then blow.

Terpesthai

These are fingers crawling up your back,
Brushing your neck’s edge,
To push at joints of muscles
Joining bones, and press
The pain from out the flesh.

Now I am no anatomist, my science creeps
In the direction of the will (as chance
May please) and my discoveries
May be confused or, worse, for ill.

But touch with me, just
To trace their slope, the thoughts
On which the mind has built, and grope
These tender places, fiddling
The disjoint spaces where ideas
Become the bodies’ faces -- not

That these knots can be redone
Or unstrung, but so that reason
And the heart can join for once.

Guilt

Will I be pure? Water
Is a purifying agent,
Under whose streams
The body becomes clean:

It makes you think the world needs a storm.

But what will dissolve the sins of thought? Wash
The stains of joy? Floss and flood the cavities of will?

How can I bear to look upon the light,
For whom all things are colored by desire’s shades?

In time the pennants of our virtue fade.

Idealism

Objects are so close. You can touch them.
Not that they are a matter for such making,
But the green yields to my fingers and the sky
Pierces the pupil in which distance bends
The eye. Then how is it we never touch them,
Trees and bicycles and grass? Because the mind
Must clasp the feeling which resides within
The body’s pass.

Apotheosis

When the globe is cerulean
Entity of brims
That flow in their identity
To, mounting, ice
The lava cool that legs
Earth’s good green, a property
Among the planets’
Impropriety who speaks
The possible by light’s machine,

That soul is plausible
Whose voice abates;
The sexless mind
Regenerates:

This glancing fountain
Must create
The thought to which the sky
Prostrates.

Ode 1.11

You ought not to define
The line that gods have cut
For us nor pore
Upon Akkadian scores. Suffer
What may come, if Zeus
Should ration many storms
Or makes a tribute of this last
To scratch the pumice of our shores.
Prudence, Leuconoe, be thy name:
Gulp the the dripping vine and claim
Your day; compel wide hope
Into a briefer frame, and only
Minimally trust in what is far away.