I. All the Preludes to Felicity
It is time that beats in the breast and it is time
That batters against the mind, silent and proud,
The mind that knows it is destroyed by time.
Time is a horse that runs in the heart, a horse
Without a rider on a road at night.
The mind sits listening and hears it pass.
It is someone walking rapidly in the street.
The reader by the window has finished his book
And tells the hour by the lateness of the sounds.
Even breathing is the beating of time, in kind:
A retardation of its battering,
A horse grotesquely taut, a walker like
A shadow in mid-earth … If we propose
A large-sculptured, platonic person, free from time,
And imagine for him the speech he cannot speak,
A form, then, protected from the battering, may
Mature: A capable being may replace
Dark horse and walker walking rapidly.
Felicity, ah! Time is the hooded enemy,
The inimical music, the enchantered space
In which the enchanted preludes have their place.
II. Description of a Platonic Person
Then came Brazil to nourish the emaciated
Romantic with dreams of her avoirdupois, green glade
Of serpents like z rivers simmering,
Green glade and holiday hotel and world
Of the future, in which the memory had gone
From everything, flying the flag of the nude,
The flag of the nude above the holiday hotel.
But there was one invalid in that green glade
And beneath that handkerchief drapeau, severe,
Signal, a character out of solitude,
Who was what people had been and still were,
Who lay in bed on the west wall of the sea,
Ill of a question like a malady,
Ill of a constant question in his thought,
Unhappy about the sense of happiness.
Was it that—a sense and beyond intelligence?
Could the future rest on a sense and be beyond
Intelligence? On what does the present rest?
This platonic person discovered a soul in the world
And studied it in his holiday hotel.
He was a Jew from Europe or might have been.
III. Fire-monsters in the Milky Brain
Man, that is not born of woman but of air,
That comes here in the solar chariot,
Like rhetoric in a narration of the eye—
We knew one parent must have been divine,
Adam of beau regard, from fat Elysia,
Whose mind malformed this morning metaphor,
While all the leaves leaked gold. His mind made morning,
As he slept. He woke in a metaphor: this was
A metamorphosis of paradise,
Malformed, the world was paradise malformed …
Now, closely the ear attends the varying
Of this precarious music, the change of key
Not quite detected at the moment of change
And, now, it attends the difficult difference.
To say the solar chariot is junk
Is not a variation but an end.
Yet to speak of the whole world as metaphor
Is still to stick to the contents of the mind
And the desire to believe in a metaphor.
It is to stick to the nicer knowledge of
Belief, that what it believes in is not true.
IV. Dry Birds Are Fluttering in Blue Leaves
It is never the thing but the version of the thing:
The fragrance of the woman not her self,
Her self in her manner not the solid block,
The day in its color not perpending time,
Time in its weather, our most sovereign lord,
The weather in words and words in sounds of sound.
These devastations are the divertissements
Of a destroying spiritual that digs-a-dog,
Whines in its hole for puppies to come see,
Springs outward, being large, and, in the dust
Being small, inscribes ferocious alphabets,
Flies like a bat expanding as it flies,
Until its wings bear off night’s middle witch;
And yet remains the same, the beast of light,
Groaning in half-exploited gutturals
The need of its element, the final need
Of final access to its element—
Of access like the page of a wiggy book,
Touched suddenly by the universal flare
For a moment, a moment in which we read and repeat
The eloquences of light’s faculties.