Casino
Pointless any happiness that happens by plan:
To live in nature is to suffer luck.
Thus blessed, thus cursed, I am myself again,
Empty-tipsy, drinking to the lees my lack.
Wind-tousled cloud, cloud-tousled chance,
Deep in the unseen an anchor drops, and clings.
O my lilting, my light-sheer, my linen existence:
As of another nothing floating over things.
I like the cakelike casino on the dunes,
And how the strict fingers of skeletal light
Come alive on the baize, and the view, vast as mist.
I like the tone of green that oceans in,
And the tight rosebuds of wine that bloom in the mind,
And the towering, scouring seagull, in whose eyes nothing
is lost.
(1912)
Hard night
Hard night. Homer. Homeless sails.
I’ve listened to the list of ships in my own voice.
I’ve seen, as my own voice fails,
Those strange cranes arrowing sorrowing over Hellas.
Ever alien, ever more interior, these shores,
And the sun-flecked, god-picked wings glinting spray—
Anxiety’s army, ghost souls of Achaea,
Without your one longing, what is dying for?
The singer and the sea, all things are moved by love.
But what is that to me? Homer is dead.
And a wall of silence, eerily eloquent,
Breaks like a black wave above my bed.
(1915)
Not one word
Not one word.
Purge the mind of what the eye has seen:
Woman, prison, bird.
Everything.
Otherwise some wrong dawn
Your mouth moves
And a sudden pine
Needles through your nerves,
A trapped wasp crazes
In your brain,
And in the old desk’s ink stain
A forest mazes
Inward and inward
To the unpicked
And sun-perfected
Blueberries
Where you now and now always
Must stand,
An infinite inch
Between that sweetness
And your hand.
(October 1930)
Night piece
Come love let us sit together
In the cramped kitchen breathing kerosene.
There’s fuel enough to forget the weather,
The knife is ours and the bread is clean.
Come love let us play the game
Of what to take and when to run,
Of come with me and come what may
And holding hands to hold off the sun.
(January 1931)
To the translator
Forget it. Don’t tempt yourself with tongues
Whose blood is not your own.
Better to bite a light bulb, eat an urn.
How long the haunting, how high the cost, that sky-wide
scream
Of the bird we cannot name—
Like a happy man undone by an alley-flash of lace.
In the end, when the soul rends a man toward that
timelessness
It was his whole ambition to express,
To speak a denatured thing is to fling the first dirt on your
own cold face.
Happy Tasso, Bittersweet Ariosto, how they enchant us,
enchant us,
Until they don’t. And if it’s they who come, in the hour
of ice,
Throbbing their blue-brained truths, their starved and
larval eyes?
So: you, then. Your animal urge. Your primal pride.
To you is given this sponge dipped in vinegar, bitter wad
Of silence: you, who thought love of sound alone could
lead to God.
(1933)
