Sun-Up, and Other Poems Part 5

I

That was a great night we spied upon See-sawing home, Singing a hot sweet song to the super-stars Shuffling off behind the smoke-haze...

Fog-horns sentimentalizing on the river...

Lights dwindling to shining slits In the wet asphalt...

Purring lights... red and green and golden-whiskered...

Digging daintily pointed claws in the soft mud...

... But you did not know...

As the trains made golden augers Boring in the darkness...

How my heart kept racing out along the rails, As a spider runs along a thread And hauls him in again To some drawing point...

You did not know How wild ducks' wings Itch at dawn...

How at dawn the necks of wild ducks Arch to the sun And new-mown air Trickles sweet in their gullets.

II

As water, cleared of the reflection of a bird That has lately flown across it, Yet trembles with the beating of its wings, So my soul... emptied of the known you... utterly...

Is yet vibrant with the cadence of the song You might have been....

'Twas a great night...

With never a waste look over a shoulder Curved to the crook of the wind...

And a great word we 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 ma.s.sed 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?

ALt.i.tUDE

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 pa.s.sed 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 a.s.siduously 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 gra.s.sed 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?

G.o.d... G.o.d...

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 gra.s.s.

And only the wind scandal-mongers with gum trees, p.r.i.c.king 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 roue, Neptune, Cranes over his bald-head moons At the twinkling heel of a sky-sc.r.a.per.

ELECTRICITY