Half Life

With golden pears it hangs
and full of wild roses
the land into the sea,
you proud swans,
and drunk with kisses
you dunk your heads
in the sober holy water.

Woe, where shall I take,
when it is winter, the flowers,
where sunshine,
and shadows of earth?

The walls stand
Mute and cold, in the wind
The flags rattle.

Patmos

Near
God is and difficult to grasp.
But where danger is as well there grows
Salvation.
In dark they live,
the eagles, and fearlessly
the sons of the Alps go over the abyss
On bridges built lightly.
Oh, as there around
The peaks of time lay piled, and the dearest ones
Live near to us, grown weak upon
The separate mountains,
thus give us innocent waters,
Give us wings, and truest minds
To venture and return.

So speaking, then a spirit took me
faster than I could believe
from my own house farther
than I ever thought to go.
Dawning in the twilight
I went among the shadowed woods
And wistful streams of the homeland;
I never knew these lands;
But soon, in new radiance, mysterious
In the golden haze,
Grown rapidly
With the steps of the sun,
perfumed with a thousand peaks,

Asia spread before me. Dazzled I searched
For something known, for I was unused
To the broad streets, where coming down
From the Tmolus the gold-bedecked Paktolos rides
And Taurus stands and Messogis
And the garden full of flowers,
As a silent fire; but up in the light
A silver snow flourishes high;
And, as a witness of immortal life
on impenetrable walls,
the ivy grows immemorial; but they are borne
by living columns, cedars, and laurels,
the solemn,
god-built palaces.

Yet round Asia's gates there rush
here and there outstretching
in uncertain levels of the sea
enough of unshaded straits,
though a sailor knows the islands.
And since I heard
that one of them nearby
was Patmos,
I desired much
To stop there and to there
Draw near to that dark grotto.
For not as Cyprus
Rich with springs, or
any of the others, is Patmos
situated; not augustly,

But she is hospitable
in her poorer house
and if from a shipwreck or lamenting
for his homeland or
a departed friend
A stranger nears her,
she hears gladly, as do her children
The voices of the hot grove,
and where the sands blow, and the surface
of the field is cracked, these noises
Hear him and lovingly repeat
the lamentations of the man. So once she cared
For he whom god had loved,
the seer, who in a holy youth was

Bound with
the son of the highest, inseparably, for
the bearer of storms had loved the simpleness
of his disciple, and that mindful man had seen
The countenance of god directly,
Since they sat together
at the mystery of the wine, when it came
to the hour of the last supper,
And in his great soul, calmly foreseeing his own death,
The Lord spoke of that and also of his final love,
for he had never enough of words to speak
of kindness, then, and to lighten, when he saw it,
The wild rage of the world:
For all is good. Then he died. There would be
much to say of this. And they saw him as he glanced, victorious,
joyful even at the end, his friends,

But they mourned, now evening was come
in shock, for they had great ambitions in their souls,
these men, but beneath the sun they loved
their lives and did not wish to leave
the countenance of the lord
and the homeland. It drove into them
Like fire into steel, and at their side
The shadow of their beloved went.
Therefore he sent the spirit upon them
And the house did shake and the storm of God
Rolled thundering far above
their expectant heads, as they were gathered
musing heavily, these heroes set for death,

As now he came to them once more
in parting. For now died off the day of sun
majestically, the unbent radiating scepter
broken from himself, as a suffering God,
For he would come again
when the time was right. It would have been wrong
Much later, and disloyal, cutting off abruptly
his work with man, but now
it pleased him
To live in loving night, to preserve
in simple eyes steadfast
abysses of wisdom. And there also flourish
Deep in the mountains living images,

Though it is fearful how god has scattered
the living endlessly here and there.
And so it was to leave the faces
of dear friends behind and go off
into the mountains alone,
where recognized twice
the holy spirit was united; and it was not prophesied,
but grabbed then at the hair, in the moment
When hurring away
the god glanced back upon them
And vowing, so he would stop,
holding forth as if bound with golden ropes
they outstretched their hands
and called it evil–

But then when dies
who beauty most had loved,
so that a miracle was on his form
and gods had chosen him, and when
eternally they are a riddle for each other
And each cannot grasp
the other, those who live on together
in memory; and when this comes that tears away
not only sand or pastures and destroys
the temples, but when the fame
of the demigod and his disciples
disappears and even the highest
turns his countenance, so that
no immortal thing is seen in heaven or
on green earth– what then is this?

It is the toss of the winnower,
when he shovels up the wheat
and throws it to the clean air,
swinging it across the threshing floor.
Before him falls the chaff down at his feet,
but finally the kernel emerges.
It is not bad if some of it gets lost,
or of his speech the living tone then fades–
for the work of gods is much like our own,
The highest does not want all done at once.
As mineshafts bear iron
and Etna its glowing resins
so I had richness,
an image to form, alike
to look on, Christ as he was,

But if one spurred himself along
and talking sadly, on the road, assaulted me
since I was helpless, and as a servant sought
to replicate an image of the God-
once in their rage I saw them visibly
the lords of heaven, not that I would become something,
but that I would learn. The lords are kind, but what they hate the most
While they do reign, is falsehood, when there is no more
Among men what can be called humanity. For they do not preside, but what presides
is Fate undying, and its work proceeds then
Of itself, and hurries to its end.
When heavenly processions lead still higher
the strong then call him, as the sun, the exultant son of the highest,

As a watchword, and here is the staff
of song, that beckons downward,
for nothing is wicked. It awakens the dead
Who are not yet corrupted. But many
there are of shy eyes still awaiting
to see this light. They do not wish
to flourish in the sharp radiance,
for a golden bridle holds their courage back.
But when,
with eyebrows risen
forgetting of the world
A calm radiance then falls from holy scripture,
they may enjoy that grace,
and in their quiet sight may study it.

And if the gods now do,
As I believe, love me,
how much more must they You,
for one thing I know, that the will
of the eternal father
concerns you greatly.
His sign is silent
in the thundering heavens. And one stands beneath it
All his life. For Christ lives on.
But it is the heroes, they his sons
who all have come, and holy scriptures
of him, and the deeds of the earth
elucidate the lightning now
like a race unstoppable. But he is there. For his works
he has known from the beginning.

Too long, for far too long
the honor of the gods has been invisible.
For they must nearly guide
our fingers, and shamefully
A force is torn from us by the heart.
For every heavenly thing expects a sacrifice,
but if this is neglected,
it has never brought good.
We have served our mother, earth,
as well the light of sun, without awareness,
for what the father loves the most,
who reigns over all,
is that the fixed word be maintained,
that what endures be well interpreted.
So German song must follow in this way.

Perhaps all men then end like Chaplin,
Bumbling and sprawling and interrupted by titles
That brace existence, though none may speak.
And we must wander too these wobbling streets
Around these obscure hobbies of
that we cannot extricate, a small ship
That may not land on a foreign shore.
The sun is black; the walls are white,
A gracious lady awaits her stumbling fate
And as we are, it is unknown, if a small crowd
Has gathered here as if about a fire
To stir sense in these outtakes by their ridicule,
Or else some editor to cut the strands
At whim if it pleases– it need not be a tragedy,
When the last reel spins– a mere ornamented fin,
A jaunty tune, a tramp merging with the distance–
Some tears amidst applause, but mostly laughter–
that one man could stumble so, and redirect himself
Suffer the swings and the barrages as the fool,
Not a sanctified, cripple Christ but a solid man
Up and down the alleys of hard earth dignifying,
Unaware of bruises, that God has taken everything
From him, a wife, a family– the curtain pulls;
the organ grinder bows. It is good to spend a day
In the city of God.

The furnace of the sun blows on.
Infinite is the town you have travelled
Far to see, drinking in its blood.

Day is a glass bottle broken underfoot.
It is beautiful to pass this country
where the sun has
Our days have little weight; they blow like newspapers
Crushed in a pane of sky.
Over the cramps of the earth, the infinite geographies.
We have our pretty faces for the names. The names have pretty faces
For the names. Each thing born is as if written by a casual hand,
who dazed on lazy afternoons had no knowledge of the weight
Thrown earthward. It is enough to be exact
When passion fails, to pale the shadings of the wall
The mind's pale, which in the season's mind
May not dissatisfy. It is enough to watch in the street
And know a woman in the street, collecting
the bitter pandemonium of some angelic rage
As a television, tuned to a false channel, would a blurred world
Of solid value to grope among the seemed.


There is yet too much sanity in this madness.
A rotten fish propels the river upward, on the shore
A fisherman sits allegorically in the waste of his life
And the two meet, senseless.



After the witless night
Day came in long sentences.

You turned like a mouth
and shut.

sunrise on katahdin

A solitary heartbeat must suffice, if the soul has made
This blistered yearning to a skin, a blank wind rattling
Dead thoughts from the trees that lift in dim processions
Over fantasy's feet, the feet of a wanderer now still.
Still, one feels the mountain as oneself, meeting the pass
Of lone ridge that yawns and gives to the last face a mere truth
Void of shine; one has just begun to catch oneself, here
In the dark space of things unsaid, eternal hesitations,
When an ancient sun dips back, invidious, to blank night's eyes,
Its dark peaks seen in darkened pools dissolving

Irresolute truths that scatter in the brain.
Each thing's fitfulness is opened to the midnight eye:
Infinities of flickered flames that creep and wander on
This incessant lack of god. It must have once sufficed, the flame;
It must suffice. But in this endless bliss of stones we falter
Consciously, through these mute things loved by feet, and carry on
Extinct desires in object tongues, though the going soul may keep
Its needs concealed. It is audible, the heart of earth
And tendons of earth that strain beneath its vast and unfelt weight...

Perhaps we are born to carry this, an eternity the earth forgets,
a close craft, through some machine upheld in anguished cry
Pandora caught where the path ends sculpting new of earth,
Shaping earthbound things of us. And yet we breathe the sky...
We have climbed too quickly, seen the forest plunging to the floor,
The arduous path discarded like a string and disconsolately
Broken, our bodies stripped and left as we take the air.

The heart grows faint; it knows its altitude. Each earth below seems
As a man who rises and falls, craving a consciousness of sky
And vanishing vainly. We have known these episodes, these atlantic
Places that linger like a loving hand and lift, where we gather
The stones' agony and the pain of air and stand at last
Shaking the cool containments in the peak of the mind.
The highest is too high; we stand a moment; it shatters us
In swift minutia that sweep across a strand, mere exiles gathered,
Gone– this is a footprint of a father– this a wife–
This is the valley bent below us with rage, a soft thunder
Tilting the glass of daylight down, upon the gone, veiled
Forest that hides the soul. The mind unmakes this
Ecstasy of peaks, this mesh of self and miracle.
A vision sealed in a simple sleep, or a constant foot
Need not know dreaming, as if the landscape were a murdered god
The soul climbs, a childless angel pinned to the back of god.

At last there is no world but heaven, speared in the atlas air.
As a country once traveled is forgotten, it dissolves
With the thought of it. It is clear, we may not fear this leaving.
But must the mind always mark its height, its progress in time?
The mind in dreaming dreams the mind awake, like a net of hooks
Catching. So reason spreads its blanket in the new bald sun
Below a clear and miniscule past like an ant crushed by a child.
The mind wants universe and it will comb the mind outstepping
The skull to grasp at paradise, still, a slick sight held
In an empty handful on an empty globe. These unseen diameters
Hold Eden bare: this it is; the mind at radiance, when hope has fell
And vision, the raw thing beating in the meat of day.

Is it beautiful to break the passing days
Underfoot, like glass bottles?

The furnace of the sun blows on.
Infinite is the name of the far off
Town you drank blood in.

Our days have little weight; they are blown like newspaper
Over the cramps of the earth, the infinite geographies.
We have our pretty faces for the names. The names have pretty faces
For the names. Each thing born is as if written by a casual hand,
who dazed on lazy afternoons had no knowledge of the weight
It threw earthward. It is enough to be exact
When passion fails, to pale the shadings of the wall
The mind's colors, which in the palest season of the mind
Has little chance to mimic fire. It is enough to watch a woman in the street
And know it is a woman in the street, without saying it,
And to feel the bitter pandemonium of some angelic rage
As in a television, tuned to a false channel, to look at a clock
And return a solid value, to make of the groping world a thing not seemed.


There is yet too much sanity in this madness.
A rotten fish propels the river upward, on the shore
A fisherman sits allegorically in the waste of his life
And the two meet, senseless.



After the witless night
Day came in long sentences.
You turned like a mouth
and shut.

I am unworthy, Walt, of your tripping sentences,
your biblical oceans, your beard that tumbles with boys
In the furnace of night, always the supple yes of dignity
that redesires you as you are, as you splendor and shake
Moonlight from your wondrous old form like ancient tongues,



You who lay exposed too long, licking the cruel ironies of wind
From a lone bedpost, groping the infinite sockets of day
For a cheap solace,


A wind is in oblation
With a way we capture wind


The first human must have come into existence with a loss of faith, like a stone dropping. It is a loss of faith that leads to observation, for observation splits, but truth is whole.


(write a book about the first humans!!!!!)

Before there were words there were pure needs. Only when these needs had gone were there words for them; with the word we could to try to recall the need, but they remained separate things, the word always exercising its tyranny over the object as if it wanted to wholly replace it.




Light satire among the sublime is genius...show how human foibles are encased in this enormous natural stir of purposelessness.


You despair because you feel purposeless...and yet the universe is purposeless as well. So you need not feel as if you go against the universe, which would itself be the most depressing thing you could do. Living your life purposelessly, even if you haven't reached that point, is the way of the universe. Following doggedly whim and discipline is the way.

Beautiful is not the shape of things assuming heaven
As a sphere where pure unblemished nations lie;
It is a mirror smashed at angles wrong toward earth
Its odd revenge flung down, false teeth and strict cannibalism
On the vortex of the still becoming man.
To speak of beauty is to lie where beauty has devoured,
Splintered as a thousand tears of glass
That devastate a widow's arm. The soul grows in hideous fire
And rakes its wordless being on the world, unfolding
That real thing more than real, perception's edge,
A vision of all these ruined things arising
In onslaughts of peace rifting temples old as wire
Torn from a heart. It is the mind's tornado:
Do not wait in the basement for calm to come.
Unskin fear's parasite, the heart that craves itself
Surviving, to that cold unthinking
Nerve laid bare in a palm.

(It is not this– this violence, this flowing germ:
It stems from this, its radiant spike unravels
The cool recollections of furious night.)

Beauty is the boy who sees death
Torn with life:
Hologram blown, bent
To a shivering deep, to resurrect
like a gathering god
an unfilled sentence,
Refusing the rule. He stands in the threshhold
of the fallen world
Swollen in death, like a drink poured in a glass
then frozen, pure urge emerging
from the wreck of death–

This is the word that starts the world,
When gone forms crack
And scratch their names into the soil–
The terrible oblivion of a scarred title,
A nude expectant hand
That traces the chasm of ruins
It dreamt of the new world...