Precipitations | Page 9

an
ascending light.
Something sweet and wanton faded from the old
maid's lips-- Something of Pierrot chasing after love,
A bacchante
dying in her sleep,
A shadow,
And a gray cat.
THE NIXIE

He lies in cool shadows safe under rocks,
His eyes brown stones,

Worn smooth and soft,
But uncrumbled.
He reaches forth covert
child-claws
To tickle the silver bellies of the little blind fish
As they
swim secretly above him.
He laughs--
The school splinters, panic
stricken.
As we stare through the lucid gold water
He gazes up at us from his
shadowy retreat
In combative safety.
There are times when he
pretends to himself that he is a god, Water god, land god,
god-in-the-sky.
We cannot laugh at his grotesquerie.
We are wistful
before the pathetic gallantries of his
imagination.
OLD LADIES' VALHALLA
I am thinking of a little house,
A pretty gray silk dress,
And a little
maid with a tidy white apron.
I am thinking of thin yellow angels
Flying out of Sevres china tea
cups,
And a cool spirit with slanting green eyes,
Who peers at me
through the screen of plants
I have placed in the corner between the
hearth and the window. I am thinking of the peace in one's own little
home
When the afternoon sunshine drips on the shiny floor,
And
the rugs are in order,
And the roses in the bowl plunge into shadow

Like pink nymphs into a pool,
While there is no sound to be heard
above the hum
of the teakettle
Save the benevolent buzzing of flies in the clean sash
curtain.
PORTRAITS OF POETS
I
(For L. R.)

To rush over dark waters,
A swift bird with cruel talons;
To seize
life--
Your life for her--
To hold it,
Hold it struggling--
To kiss
it.
II
Crystal self-containment,
Giving out only what is sent.
Startled,

The circumference retreats
As it mounts higher, flamelike,
Still and
clear without radiance,
Ascending without self-explanation.
A skeleton falls apart
With the dignity of comprehensible pathos,

The bones bleached by denial.
III
With the impalpable lightness of May breezes
Begins a battle of
flower petals:
Cowering in the primrose whirlwind his lips have
blown,
The little grotesque with the shattered heart,
Fearful,
Yet
sinister in his fearfulness.
THEODORE DREISER
The man body jumbled out of the earth, half formed,
Clay on the feet,

Heavy with the lingering might of chaos.
The man face so high
above the feet
As if lonesome for them like a child.
The veins that
beat heavily with the music they but half
understood
Coil languidly around the heart
And lave it in the death
stream
Of a grand impersonal benignance.
PIETA
The child--
Warm chubby thighs,
Fat brown arms,
An unsurprised
face--
Cries for jam.
The mother buys him with jam.
An old woman,
Tottering on lean leather skinned legs,
Sucks with

glazing eyes
The crystal silken milk
That flows from the death
wound
In a young flower-soft, jewel-soft body.
BRAZIL THROUGH A MIST
THE RANCH
TROPICAL LIFE
White flower,
Your petals float away
But I hardly hear them.
TWENTY-FOUR HOURS
The day is so long and white,
A road all dust,
Smooth monotony;

And the night at the end,
A hill to be climbed,
Slowly, laboriously,

While the stars prick our hands
Like thistles.
RAINY SEASON
A flock of parrakeets
Hurled itself through the mist;
Harsh wild
green
And clamor-tongued
Through the dim white forest.
They
vanished,
And the lips of Silence
Sucked at the roots of Life.
MAIL ON THE RANCH
The old man on the mule
Opens the worn saddle bags,
And takes
out the papers.
From the outer world
The thoughts come stabbing,
To taunt, baffle,
and stir me to revolt.
I beat against the sky,
Against the winds of the
mountain,
But my cries, grown thin in all this space,
Are diluted
with emptiness...
Like the air,
Thin and wide,
Touching
everything,
Touching nothing.
THE VAMPIRE BAT
What was it that came out of the night?
What was it that went away

in the night?
The little brown hen is huddled in the fence corner,

Eyes already glazing.
How should she know what came out of the
night,
Or what was taken away in the night?
A shadow passed
across the moon.
The wind rustled in the mango trees.
And now, in
the morning,
The little brown hen is huddled in the fence corner,

Eyes already glazing;
Because a shadow passed across the moon,

And the wind rustled in the mango trees.
CONSERVATISM
The turkeys,
Like hoop-skirted old ladies
Out walking,
Display
their solemn propriety.
A terrible force,
Hungry and destructive,
Emanates from their
mistily blinking eyes.
LITTLE PIGS
Little tail quivering,
Wrinkled snout thrusting up the mud:
He will
find God
If he keeps on like that.
THE SILLY EWE
The silly ewe comes smelling up to me.
Her tail wriggles without
hinges,
Both ends of it at once and equal.
Yesterday the parrot bit
her;
Last week the jaguar ate her young one;
But experience teaches
her nothing.
THE SNAKE
The chickens are at home in the barnyard,
The pigs in the swill,

And the flowers in the garden;
But where do you belong,
With your
lacquered coils,
O snake?
THE YEAR

Days and days float by.
On the sides of the mountains
Blue
shadows shift
And sift into silence.
Morning...
The cock crows.

There is that rosy glow on the mountain's edge;
Jose in the door of his
hut;
Maria's lace bobbins
Tapping, tapping.
Evening...
The
parrot's shrill cry;
Pale silver green stars.
Night...
The ghosts of
dead Joses
And dead Marias
Sitting in the moonlight.
Peace--

Depressing,
Interminable
Peace.
BURNING MOUNTAINS
I
A herder set