Sun-Up and Other Poems | Page 9

threw?For memory to play knuckles with...?A word the waters of the world have washed,?Leaving it stark and without smell...?A world that rattles well in emptiness: Good-by.
THE DREAM
I have a dream?to fill the golden sheath?of a remembered day....?(Air?heavy and massed and blue?as the vapor of opium...?domes?fired in sulphurous mist...?sea?quiescent as a gray seal...?and the emerging sun?spurting up gold?over Sydney, smoke-pale, rising out of the bay....)?But the day is an up-turned cup?and its sun a junk of red iron?guttering in sluggish-green water--?where shall I pour my dream?
ALTITUDE
I wonder?how it would be here with you,?where the wind?that has shaken off its dust in low valleys?touches one cleanly,?as with a new-washed hand,?and pain?is as the remote hunger of droning things,?and anger?but a little silence?sinking into the great silence.
COMRADES
Life?You have been good to me....?You have not made yourself too dear?to juggle with.
NOCTURNE
Indigo bulb of darkness?Punctured by needle lights?Through a fissure of brick canyon shutting out stars,?And a sliver of moon?Spigoting two high windows over the West river....
Boy, I met to-night,?Your eyes are two red-glowing arcs shifting with my vision.... They reflect as in a fading proof?The deadened eyes of a woman,?And your shed virginity,?Light as the withered pod of a sweet pea,?Moist and fragrant?Blows against my soul.?What are you to me, boy,?That I, who have passed so many lights,?Should carry your eyes?Like swinging lanterns?
CACTUS SEED
Radiant notes?piercing my narrow-chested room,?beating down through my ceiling--?smeared with unshapen?belly-prints of dreams?drifted out of old smokes--?trillions of icily?peltering notes?out of just one canary,?all grown to song?as a plant to its stalk,?from too long craning at a sky-light?and a square of second-hand blue.
Silvery-strident throat--?so assiduously serenading my brain,?flinching under?the glittering hail of your notes--?were you not safe behind... rats know what thickness of... plastered wall... I might fathom?your golden delirium?with throttle of finger and thumb?shutting valve of bright song.
II
But if... away off... on a fork of grassed earth?socketing an inlet reach of blue water...?if canaries (do they sing out of cages?)?flung such luminous notes,?they would sink in the spirit...?lie germinal...?housed in the soul as a seed in the earth...?to break forth at spring with the crocuses into young smiles
on the mouth.?Or glancing off buoyantly,?radiate notes in one key?with the sparkle of rain-drops?on the petal of a cactus flower?focusing the just-out sun.
Cactus... why cactus??God... God...?somewhere... away off...?cactus flowers, star-yellow?ray out of spiked green,?and empties of sky?roll you over and over?like a mother her baby in long grass.?And only the wind scandal-mongers with gum trees,?pricking multiple leaves?at his amazing story.
WINDOWS
TIME-STONE
Hallo, Metropolitan--?Ubiquitous windows staring all ways,?Red eye notching the darkness.?No use to ogle that slip of a moon.?This midnight the moon,?Playing virgin after all her encounters,?Will break another date with you.?You fuss an awful lot,?You flight of ledger books,?Overrun with multiple ant-black figures?Dancing on spindle legs?An interminable can-can.?But I'd rather... like the cats in the alley... count time?By the silver whistle of a moonbeam?Falling between my stoop-shouldered walls,?Than all your tally of the sunsets,?Metropolitan, ticking among stars.
TRAIN WINDOW
Small towns?Crawling out of their green shirts...?Tubercular towns?Coughing a little in the dawn...?And the church...?There is always a church?With its natty spire?And the vestibule--?That's where they whisper:?Tzz-tzz... tzz-tzz... tzz-tzz...?How many codes for a wireless whisper--?And corn flatter than it should be?And those chits of leaves?Gadding with every wind??Small towns?From Connecticut to Maine:?Tzz-tzz... tzz-tzz...tzz-tzz...
SCANDAL
Aren't there bigger things to talk about?Than a window in Greenwich Village?And hyacinths sprouting?Like little puce poems out of a sick soul??Some cosmic hearsay--?As to whom--it can't be Mars! put the moon--that way....?Or what winds do to canyons?Under the tall stars...?Or even?How that old roué, Neptune,?Cranes over his bald-head moons?At the twinkling heel of a sky-scraper.
ELECTRICITY
Out of fiery contacts...?Rushing auras of steel?Touching and whirled apart...?Out of the charged phallases?Of iron leaping?Female and male,?Complete, indivisible, one,?Fused into light.
SKYSCRAPERS
Skyscrapers... remote, unpartisan...?Turning neither to the right nor left?Your imperturbable fronts....?Austerely greeting the sun?With one chilly finger of stone....?I know your secrets... better than all the policemen
like fat blue mullet along the avenues.
WALL STREET AT NIGHT
Long vast shapes... cooled and flushed through with darkness.... Lidless windows?Glazed with a flashy luster?From some little pert cafe chirping up like a sparrow.?And down among iron guts?Piled silver?Throwing gray spatter of light... pale without heat...?Like the pallor of dead bodies.
EAST RIVER
Dour river?Jaded with monotony of lights?Diving off mast heads....?Lights mad with creating in a river... turning its sullen back... Heave up, river...?Vomit back into the darkness your spawn of light....?The night will gut what you give her.
SECRETS
INTERIM
The earth is motionless?And poised in space...?A great bird resting in its flight?Between the alleys of the stars.?It is the wind's hour off....?The wind has nestled down among the corn....?The two speak privately together,?Awaiting the whirr of wings.
AFTER STORM
Was there a wind??Tap... tap...?Night pads upon the snow?with moccasined feet...?and it is still... so still...?an eagle's feather?might fall like a stone.?Could there have been a storm...?mad-tossing golden mane on the neck of the wind...?tearing up the sky...?loose-flapping like