I

Again they are plowing the field by the river; in the air exultant a smell of wild garlic crushed out by the shining steel in the furrow that opens softly behind the heavy-paced horses, dark moist noisy with fluttering of sparrows; and their chirping and the clink of the harness chimes like bells; and the plowman walks at one side with sliding steps, his body thrown back from the waist. O the sudden sideways lift of his back and his arms as he swings the plow from the furrow.

And behind the river sheening blue and the white beach and the sails of schooners, and hoarsely laughing the black crows wheel and glint. Ha! Haha!

Other springs you answered their laughing
and shouted at them across the fallow lands
that smelt of wild garlic and pinewoods and earth.

This year the crows flap cawing overhead Ha! Haha!
and the plow-harness clinks
and the pines echo the moaning shore.

No one laughs back at the laughing crows.
No one shouts from the edge of the new-plowed field.

Sandy Point

II

The full moon soars above the misty street filling the air with a shimmer of silver. Roofs and chimney-pots cut silhouettes of dark against the milk-washed sky! O moon fast waning!

Seems only a night ago you hung a shallow cup of topaz-colored glass that tilted towards my feverish dry lips brimful of promise in the flaming west: O moon fast waning!

And each night fuller and colder, moon, the silver has welled up within you; still I I have not drunk, only the salt tide of parching desires has welled up within me: only you have attained, waning moon.

The moon soars white above the stony street, wan with fulfilment. O will the tide of yearning ebb with the moon’s ebb leaving me cool darkness and peace with the moon’s waning?

Madrid

III

The shrill wind scatters the bloom of the almond trees but under the bark of the shivering poplars the sap rises and on the dark twigs of the planes buds swell.

Out in the country along soggy banks of ditches among busy sprouting grass there are dandelions. Under the asphalt under the clamorous paving-stones the earth heaves and stirs and all the blind live things expand and writhe.

Only the dead lie still in their graves, stiff, heiratic, only the changeless dead lie without stirring.

Spring is not a good time
for the dead.

Battery Park

IV

Buildings shoot rigid perpendiculars
latticed with window-gaps
into the slate sky.

Where the wind comes from the ice crumbles about the edges of green pools; from the leaping of white thighs comes a smooth and fleshly sound, girls grip hands and dance grey moss grows green under the beat of feet of saffron crocus-stained.

Where the wind comes from purple windflowers sway on the swelling verges of pools, naked girls grab hands and whirl fling heads back stamp crimson feet.

Buildings shoot rigid perpendiculars
latticed with window-gaps
into the slate sky.

Garment-workers loaf in their overcoats (stare at the gay breasts of pigeons that strut and peck in the gutters). Their fingers are bruised tugging needles through fuzzy hot layers of cloth, thumbs roughened twirling waxed thread; they smell of lunchrooms and burnt cloth. The wind goes among them detaching sweat-smells from underclothes making muscles itch under overcoats tweaking legs with inklings of dancetime.

Bums on park-benches
spit and look up at the sky.

Garment-workers in their overcoats
pile back into black gaps of doors.

Where the wind comes from scarlet windflowers sway on rippling verges of pools, sound of girls dancing thud of vermillion feet.

Madison Square

V

The stars bend down through the dingy platitude of arc-lights as if they were groping for something among the houses, as if they would touch the gritty pavement covered with dust and scraps of paper and piles of horse-dung of the wide deserted square.

They are all about me; they sear my body. How very cold the stars are touching my body. What do they seek the fierce ice-flames of the stars in the platitude of arc-lights?

Plaza Mayor, Madrid

VI

Not willingly have I wronged you O Eros, it is the bitter blood of joyless generations making my fingers loosen suddenly about the full glass of purple wine for which my dry lips ache, making me turn aside from the wide arms of lovers that would have slaked the rage of my body for supple arms and burning young flushed faces to wander in solitary streets.

A funeral clatters over the glimmering cobbles; they are burying despair! Lank horses whose raw bones show through the embroidered black caparisons and whose heads jerk feebly under the tall nodding crests; they are burying despair. A great hearse that trundles crazily along under pompous swaying plumes and intricate designs of mud-splashed heraldry; they are burying despair! A coffin obliterated under the huge folds of a faded velvet pall and following clattering over the cobblestones lurching through mud-puddles a long train of cabs rain-soaked barouches old landaus off which the paint has peeled leprous coupes; in their blank windows shines the glint of interminable gaslamps; they are burying despair!

Joyously I turn into the wineshop where with strumming of tambourines and staccato cackle of castanets they are welcoming the new year, and I look in the eyes of the woman; (are they your wide eyes O Eros?) who sits with wine-dabbled lips and stained tinsel dress torn open by the brown hands of strong young lovers; (were they your brown hands O Eros?).

Your flesh is hot to my cold hands hot to thaw the ice of an old curse now that with pomp of plumes and strings of ceremonial cabs they are burying despair.

She laughs and points with a skinny forefinger at the flabby yellow breasts that hang over the tarnished tinsel of her dress, and shows me her brown wolf’s teeth; and the blood in my temples goes suddenly cold with bitterness and I know it was not despair that they buried.

New Year’s Day Casa de Bottin

VII

The leaves are full grown now and the lindens are in flower. Horseshoes leave their mark on the sun-softened asphalt. Men unloading vegetable carts along the steaming market curb bare broad chests pink from sweating; their wet shirts open to the last button cling to their ribs and shoulders.

The leaves are full grown now
and the lindens are in flower.

At night along the riverside glinting watery lights sway upon the lapping waves like many-colored candles that flicker in the wind.

The warm wind smells of pitch from the moored barges smells of the broad leaves of the trees wilted from the day’s long heat; smells of gas from the last taxicab.

Sounds of the riverwater rustling circumspectly past the piers of bridges that span the glitter with dark of men and women’s voices many voices mouth to mouth smoothness of flesh touching flesh, a harsh short sigh blurred into a kiss.

The leaves are full grown now
and the lindens are in flower.

Quai Malaquais

VIII

In me somewhere is a grey room my fathers worked through many lives to build; through the barred distorting windowpanes I see the new moon in the sky.

When I was small I sat and drew endless pictures in all colors on the walls; tomorrow the pictures should take life I would stalk down their long heroic colonnades.

When I was fifteen a red-haired girl went by the window; a red sunset threw her shadow on the stiff grey wall to burn the colors of my pictures dead.

Through all these years the walls have writhed with shadow overlaid upon shadow. I have bruised my fingers on the windowbars so many lives cemented and made strong.

While the bars stand strong, outside
the great processions of men’s lives go past.
Their shadows squirm distorted on my wall.

Tonight the new moon is in the sky.

Stuyvesant Square

IX

Three kites against the sunset
flaunt their long-tailed triangles
above the inquisitive chimney-pots.

A pompous ragged minstrel
sings beside our dining-table
a very old romantic song:

I love the sound of the hunting-horns
deep in the woods at night.

A wind makes dance the fine acacia leaves and flutters the cloths of the tables. The kites tremble and soar. The voice throbs sugared into croaking base broken with the burden of the too ancient songs.

And yet, beyond the flaring sky, beyond the soaring kites, where are no voices of singers, no strummings of guitars, the untarnished songs hang like great moths just broken through the dun threads of their cocoons, moist, motionless, limp as flowers on the inaccessible twigs of the yewtree, Ygdrasil, the untarnished songs.

Will you put your hand in mine pompous street-singer, and start on a quest with me? For men have cut down the woods where the laurel grew to build streets of frame houses, they have dug in the hills after iron and frightened the troll-king away; at night in the woods no hunter puffs out his cheeks to call to the kill on the hunting-horn.

Now when the kites flaunt bravely their tissue-paper glory in the sunset we will walk together down the darkening streets beyond these tables and the sunset.

We will hear the singing of drunken men and the songs whores sing in their doorways at night and the endless soft crooning of all the mothers, and what words the young men hum when they walk beside the river their arms hot with caresses, their cheeks pressed against their girls’ cheeks.

We will lean very close to the quiet lips of the dead and feel in our worn-out flesh perhaps a flutter of wings as they soar from us the untarnished songs.

But the minstrel sings as the pennies clink:
I love the sound of the hunting-horns
deep in the woods at night.

O who will go on a quest with me beyond all wide seas all mountain passes and climb at last with me among the imperishable branches of the yewtree, Ygdrasil, so that all the limp unuttered songs shall spread their great moth-wings and soar above the craning necks of the chimneys above the tissue-paper kites and the sunset above the diners and their dining-tables, beat upward with strong wing-beats steadily till they can drink the quenchless honey of the moon.

Place du Tertre

X

Dark on the blue light of the stream
the barges lie anchored under the moon.

On icegreen seas of sunset the moon skims like a curved white sail bellied by the evening wind and bound for some glittering harbor that blue hills circle among the purple archipelagos of cloud.

So, in the quivering bubble of my memories the schooners with peaked sails lean athwart the low dark shore; their sails glow apricot-color or glint as white as the salt-bitten shells on the beach and are curved at the tip like gulls’ wings: their courses are set for impossible oceans where on the gold imaginary sands they will unload their many-scented freight of very childish dreams.

Dark on the blue light of the stream the barges lie anchored under the moon; the wind brings from them to my ears faint creaking of rudder-cords, tiny slappings of waves against their pitch-smeared flanks, to my nose a smell of bales and merchandise the wet familiar smell of harbors and the old arousing fragrance making the muscles ache and the blood seethe and the eyes see the roadsteads and the golden beaches where with singing they would furl the sails of the schooners of childish dreams.

On icegreen seas of sunset the moon skims like a curved white sail: had I forgotten the fragrance of old dreams that the smell from the anchored barges can so fill my blood with bitterness that the sight of the scudding moon makes my eyes tingle with salt tears?

In the ship’s track on the infertile sea
now many childish bodies float
rotting under the white moon.

Quai des Grands Augustins

XI
Lua cheia está noit

Thistledown clouds cover the whole sky scurry on the southwest wind over the sea and islands; somehow in the sundown the wind has shaken out plumed seed of thistles milkweed asphodel, raked from off great fields of dandelions their ghosts of faded golden springs and carried them in billowing of mist to scurry in moonlight out of the west.

They hide the moon
the whole sky is grey with them
and the waves.

They will fall in rain
over country gardens
where thrushes sing.

They will fall in rain down long sparsely lighted streets hiss on silvery windowpanes moisten the lips of girls leaning out to stare after the footfalls of young men who splash through the glimmering puddles with nonchalant feet.

They will slap against the windows of offices where men in black suits shaped like pears rub their abdomens against frazzled edges of ledgers.

They will drizzle over new-plowed fields wet the red cheeks of men harrowing and a smell of garlic and clay will steam from the new-sowed land and sharp-eared young herdsmen will feel in the windy rain lisp of tremulous love-makings interlaced soundless kisses impact of dead springs nuzzling tremulous at life in the red sundown.

Shining spring rain O scud steaming up out of the deep sea full of portents of sundown and islands, beat upon my forehead beat upon my face and neck glisten on my outstretched hands, run bright lilac streams through the clogged channels of my brain corrode the clicking cogs the little angles the small mistrustful mirrors scatter the shrill tiny creaking of mustnot darenot cannot spatter the varnish off me that I may stand up my face to the wet wind and feel my body and drenched salty palpitant April reborn in my flesh.

I would spit the dust out of my mouth burst out of these stiff wire webs supple incautious like the crocuses that spurt up too soon their saffron flames and die gloriously in late blizzards and leave no seed.

Off Pico

XII

Out of the unquiet town seep jagged barkings lean broken cries unimaginable silent writhing of muscles taut against strangling heavy fetters of darkness.

On the pool of moonlight clots and festers a great scum of worn-out sound.

(Elagabalus, Alexander looked too long at the full moon; hot blood drowned them cold rivers drowned them.)

Float like pondflowers on the dead face of darkness cold stubs of lusts names that glimmer ghostly adrift on the slow tide of old moons waned.

(Lais of Corinth that Holbein drew drank the moon in a cup of wine; with the flame of all her lovers’ pain she seared a sign on the tombs of the years.)

Out of the voiceless wrestle of the night flesh rasping harsh on flesh a tune on a shrill pipe shimmers up like a rocket blurred in the fog of lives curdled in the moon’s glare, staggering up like a rocket into the steely star-sharpened night above the stagnant moon-marshes the song throbs soaring and dies.

(Semiramis, Zenobia lay too long in the moon’s glare; their yearning grew sere and they died and the flesh of their empires died.)

On the pool of moonlight clots and festers a great scum of worn-out lives.

No sound but the panting unsatiated breath that heaves under the huge pall the livid moon has spread above the housetops. I rest my chin on the window-ledge and wait. There are hands about my throat.

Ah Bilkis, Bilkis where the jangle of your camel bells? Bilkis when out of Saba lope of your sharp-smelling dromedaries will bring the unnameable strong wine you press from the dazzle of the zenith over the shining sand of your desert the wine you press there in Saba? Bilkis your voice loud above the camel bells white sword of dawn to split the fog, Bilkis your small strong hands to tear the hands from about my throat. Ah Bilkis when out of Saba?

Pera Palace