Moving among the moon-drained hills
      Remembering the dead,
      Lover to ghostly lover cried:
      'Whenever I see a sweet man's body
5     Great pain within me dies.
      'Enough of such rough comforting
      Drives out much suffering,
      Clapped in a ruinous grave,'
      Cried that distracted woman
10    Under a rude, red moon.
      'All night having grown unnatural
      We drop to the distended ground
      And there beneath a man-shaped tree
      Sick with sweet labor of sighs
15    I cradle nothing between my thighs.'

      Smoky midnight torches slowly enwound
      A wine-heavy head; my old eyes
      In ominous moonlight upon a photograph confound
      Some ancient satyr's head drowsing in its beard;
5     Fabulous syllables out of the bitter heart rise;
      Embittered fables of the Emperor instruct
      Oceanic ache of sex and blood
      What's most noble in the bone.
      Out of those lamp-lit or flame-lit mouths
10    Flickering vaguely there, flash thousands,
      Upside down or upright in the air,
      Battered abstract complexities of flesh;
      Dark turmoil of flesh begetting flesh.
      But all mind needs image to be complete:
15    Rage-minded Timon thrashing riches at a stone,
      Or that huckster Richard abandoned to a throne.
      Self-invented, or tossing thought of age,
      Cast-out circles of the flames reveal
      A single man upon a stage, all Lear
20    In his proud lineaments thunderstruck:
      Confusion of a mind unable to set a scene
      Among a multitude of scenes,
      Dramatic images that repeat
      Tumult of living body stylized to a theme.

      Pitching in a hay-cart
      How many discarded sighs
      Must beat upon my breath
      Before you unclench a thigh?
5          A singing boy will solace us;
           I paid him twelve and eight.
      Exhausted by post-mortem
      Duties to the state
      I watch a great bay's racing mind
10    Rehearse its fury at the gate.
           And a careless boy is singing,
           Singing past the garden gate.
      We shall hear him straining there,
      That collar shattered, the thick heart rent.         [spent.]
15    Swallows ordered in at dark
      Will keep the mares content.
           A singing boy will solace us;
           I paid him twelve and eight.
      Stars fill the drinking trough
20    While frantic moon invents a cloud---
      Enigmatic, passing out of sight,
      And the night cries out loud.
           And a careless boy is singing,
           Singing past the garden gate.

      An old man raving picks up sticks, vitally erased
      Under mazy roughness of his thumb, except where
      A counter-coalescence of the grain
      Turbulently surrounds a knot of blood.
5     Out of fisted clouds, white
      And distant as his stiff bride
      Coiling in her grave, a falcon
      Eyes the wormy meadow and descends.
      No arm, no mind controls
10    The powerful muscle, falling to a branch
      Heavy apples mellow to a bow
      Aimed at an aimless sky.
      Red memories of the man disperse
      In meditation like an arrow's throw;
15    The turning falcon's shaft
      Falls in its desire.

      Twelve white birds glimmer in a ring
      About my heart like fiery thorns of things
      Unable to be forgotten;
      And of all things else
5     Oblivion alone most would bring
      Ease to the burnt heart's ash.

      Among the wrack and disorder of the day: dusty floors,
      Half carved resemblances and journey-work,
      A symbolical blue heron stands
      With wild protesting wing and look
5     No living heron could have struck
      Deep in the grain; every crack,
      Every waver of the resinous wood
      Wakes a pulse in the unnatural neck.
      Barren out of a barren sky---
10    A heron falters to the waters here.
      That artist in his studio having aged
      Past all bitterness to stark astonishment
      At life's rapacious play
      Hammers out, from all other unlikelihood
15    Or savage guess at parts, his fixed man
      Crouched in dark patterns of the wood;
      And because that image, once complete,
      Can finish up the man who bodied it
      Gangs of ghostly herons range against the glass,
20    Stiff against one window to witness it.

      I
      In night-devouring pride
      God and ghost deride,
      And not knowing what is best,
5     Peering past his death
      Man's untiring vanity
      Consumes his bitter rest.
      II
      Flame emanating, spout upon spout,
10    Flame on his head that shouts
      Fiery Dionysus climbed
      Olympian plenitude and dined
      On rarer bones than men's eyes
      Before or after spied;
15    Then, finished with that golden feast,
      Burned statues down, head and feet,
      In serpent-seas of fire that we
      Might build again from perfected memory.
      III
20    What if destruction of vast colonnades appalled?
      Wrecked form to formless called:
      Holy fire makes wide mind a wall,
      Paints thereon, and names that image All.
      Water and desire and stark upright flame begin
25    Where world grew ocean from some ecstatic limb.
      Starved eunuchs hunching bald-eyed at the law
      Know Adam to the marrow, jumping to the fall.
      An engendered emptiness can beget
      Strong delight for those whose minds are full;
30    Stark contemplation hollows out delight
      Save when sword or scalpel pull.
      IV
      Answer to sorrow or suffering comes
      Displaying ornate mask or abrupt gun;
35    Michelangelo lobouring in the sculpted dark
      Blazed imagination forth upon uncertain tides---
      Pale constellations of his thought
      Brought death and life out of one troubled heart,
      Or might have brought ---O How long can man
40    Out of narrow sorrow extract a song?
      Right action finishes out the thought
      A lonely exalted mind began;
      Long-loved monuments fixed in the sight
      Assemble us out of desire to dissolve
45    Into that unutterable One again.

      I banish all
      Who fret and stall
      To finish out my work:
      Pitched to that extreme of thought
5     Or dark, and shambling room to room
      As from spirit to spirit
      And always preparing for that
      Never-arriving guest,
      I have labored over-long
10    Or too-thick with theme and means
      Have overwrought my song.
      Out of night like a distorted dream
      Or storm more mysterious
      A penitent ghost that cannot crest
15    The bound of rotted day appears;
      Poets, learn to live as clay
      All rich substance to underpin
      Whatever a great man might make
      Tinkering with his fate
20    In momentary play,
      Or more solemnly erect,
      Out of an undistracted hate.
      All our lot have spurned and sung
      Brevity of man, necessity of guns,
25    Unable as any mirror
      To sing ourselves aright
      Caught in enlarging night
      We turned from face to face
      As if every face would save us;
30    We who had arrogance enough
      Of thought to have thought
      That careless hands had made us.
      So that a few good words might not perish
      Or empty imagining sink unmanned
35    In unalterable loss
      Collect like solemn children round
      The myriad confusion of the foam
      And write it out again:
      Live, and live again, as old men say
40    Anxious for eternities
      That make their own wisdom seem
      But momentary toys that gleam
      And are beaten back to mud.
      I am not that holy sage
45    Remembers the misery of knowing all
      Or turning to a wall completes
      What body and its pleasure
      Were forbidden to decide---
      Under burdened moon
50    That sinks in July to rise on fire
      Out of the glittering wheat
      Knows man and his defeats
      All the sudden infirmities
      Blind violence took for sureties
55    And looks on them and laughs.
           From the womb man falls
           Or from the widowed breast
           Dispatched to a sultry grave
           That gives no rest.

      Blasted rocks and an old warped tree
      Lift above a still spot of the sea
      As though some vague hand had painted them;
      A little back from the verge,
5     A step or two back from the verge,
      And compelled by a strong salt wind,
      A clanging ear and troubled eye
      A battered head without a tooth,
      Rags and crutch and old broken bones---
10    All that wreck which I call myself,
      Having climbed an unaccustomed stair
      In a changing state of mind
      Or with a bewildered mind,
      And revealed to the weather 
15    On the promontory,
      Stood shaken by a vision.
      A burning woman and a man
      In Quattrocento gesture struck
      Above the bed where all began;
20    Half-risen above the multitudinous sea
      Above the tangled branches of the yew,
      Their abstract bodies are not mixed
      With commoner dirt, nor sullied by a cut
      Thought of sin or guilt begot.
25    Is that sweetest skin, ghostly there,
      Half human still or all celestial?
      World-engendering Pythagoras
      Stalked Heaven and never took a bride.
      ---O all that golden multitude
30    Had clarity to unpuzzle it. I,
      A skittish old man upon a rock,
      With a mouthful of rue
      With a slippery crutch on a rock
      And reeling backwards in a fright
35    Am blinded by the unbearable light.

      Turning in my mind
      That famous, heroic face
      That ciphered out
      Right government from wrong
5     And brought boys flying
      Out of bed to death,
      And because he is dead
      And cannot annul my choice,
      I make my name and death.
10    Before a great Greek head,
      Half ruined and knocked
      From a blank rock
      At bleary midnight slumped,
      When night-owls in their hunt
15    Toil from branch to branch,
      Some wrong-eyed philosopher puzzled out
      That all mind's sunk
      In the rut of the world,
      And can't drag out its ragged theme
20    Because frenzy-driven, riven mad
      By terror-ridden hours that rend
      Shifting tapestries of soul.
      All man's but broken pride,
      Wars reduced to bandages.
25    Because all image
      He can be all suffering
      Or exultant hatred personified
      To a deity. What once
      Wan man, and now's a shade
30    Stands here--- lonely as the hawthorne
      Tree traced in winter's
      Resiny dews. Dead shade
      Hammer again this form, if you can
      To make of bone and tendon
35    Pure image.
      Famous men and solitary souls
      Have cursed with equaL breath
      Generations of stupidity;
      Monuments flooded in a hole.
40    I fed by the boards as a boy---
      But when I consider that,
      Old and wrong and out of breath,
      I hammer out my death:
      Repetitions of mere breath
45    Satisfy my thought.

      Starting sex up out of books, pale apparitions
      act again the hairy rounds under always weary skies
      Straining sweating eyes for a typed text
      Always the same. Always the same
5     Ghost upon their heaving back like nets igniting
      Spines of blue fire, turbulent on the doused skin,
      Falling with hope of the dead on locked hearts to find
      Coffins of beating victims too glad to die.

      Upright in nostalgia's vice,
      The newscast knocked me flat; I am
      Hammered from
      A stiff expectancy that the past,
5     Under augers and a strong carpenter's hands,
      Could endure
      Into significance like a three-legged stool.

      All watch blindly because all are blind,
      Mixing in a bitter ditch, while hands and eyes
      Bolt new brains on a body tamed
      Out of all unnatural instinct at last
5     Until all stand, skin to skin, with all who stand
      Ecstatic round one plate, honey-filled,
      Like some dark-bodied community of bees.
      Like some dark-bodied community of bees
      All turn to that one vast image hung
10    Forever sweet in an abstract sky:
      Riotous selflove perfected to a stone
      Until no man is shaken with a hate,
      Or cold eventuality of death---
      Adam and Eve out of one stone struck.
15    Adam and Eve out of one stone struck;
      Interrupted churn of heads, or worse,
      Confused there, welded in the air, as if once
      Fury of the sexual onslaught begun,
      No deliberate loveliness
20    Could its purpose or pleasure deride:
      All watch blindly because all are blind.

      Empty eyes emptier of thought
      Returned to turn upon the upturned stone
      That still fell although it stood.
      And the river empty a little after, alone.
5     The hollow space of the wave determines
      The shape of space a wave may take,
      Filling itself, suspending itself until it break
      In predestined syllables upon the fragrant rock.

      Is it like a light
      That dissolves an empty street,
      That place where dancer meets with dancer
      Whirling like a top
5     And does not ask for music
      So long as dancing never stop?
      Or is it more like some
      Time that revolves when the skies
      Are overthrown, and dark comes
10    Ravening the tomb
      Or heavier delirium
      That body lays on eyes?

      Blows that wind of every sound
      Upon a battlement
      Where a ripping Andy Jackson stirred
      Every rebel heart to its head.
5     Raging after beauty in a fire;
      Horses tremble; men-at-arms are quiet;
      Heavy cannon are crunching through the wood.
           Noble minds all by ancient battle set ablaze.
      Upon that black battlement where
10    Great Caesar stoked,
      Half in admiration,
      Rome's mother-forges against the barbarian herd,
      Not Egyptian Cleopatra's whispers
      Nor Antony's sweet words,
15    Could still his already conquering hand.
           Noble minds all by ancient battle set ablaze.
      Staggered stars over the geared stone whirr.
      Electric fires in the mind's eye blurr
      Till all the creeping hill's a blaze;
20    Pacing ceases; the last
      Bird dies into dark;
      All night sounds transmogrified
      To a monotone.
           Noble minds all by ancient battle set ablaze.

      The gangling legs are absent; nothing whitens
      The deep blue surface curling there
      And never breaking. A stiffening face
      Turned mask-like and muscle-stricken frightens
5     White birds that pern in whiter air.
      Riotous cries cannot give its tossing countenance a place;
      Blotched reds that crust the desert water
      Until all color cakes and lies motionless, falters.
      What but attitude of all man in a rage
10    Can reverse a death's complacency and kick
      Up foam? Agony of living lonely as a bird
      Between sun and moon, moving like a spade,
      Empties the ragged features, the dull wickless eyes
      That looked on nothing common, commonly interred. A bird-
15    Like woman lingers on the quay's interrupted sounds
      To witness drowning sailors, her head in beauty bound.

      Nothing was there to see,
      A girl half-starved ranting at the sea
      Where the soulless moonlight pins
      Heart terrified in agony of sin.
5     Repeated syllables teach her mouth to pray
      In abstract hatred of the everyday
      Indigence of things, dull pain of a table
      Sat at too long or in too deep thought.
      And now she casts her moonblind eye
10    Upon cracked hills the sea derides
      With desperate complexities of sound,
      Lashing furious meanings at the departed ground.
      It was not her singing sent
      Drowning blanche mermaids to the tent
15    Of the solid man who mastered them in thought
      But found their floundering forms were soiled;
      Nor commanded, in sapphitic fury of a dream
      Drained among grey stones in lurid streams,
      The empty apparition of the departed moon
20    Fail and vanish, and hide its scorn.
      No one living saw her there,
      Rapturous between null sea and thoughtless air
      As she, thin-waisted, blind, hypnotized
      Blank waves of the sea, stark desires of the skies.

      Slow and late, with bloodied
      Paw and stumbled hoof
      Slouching huntsmen drag themselves
      Through the opening gate
5     Retiring hands had bolted.
      Unshaken belief is proof
      That the abjured rounds of pursuit, and late
      Loss of a scattered trail traced to mud
      But confirm the circuit
10    Of hound and blood.
      Unliving bodies lie heaved to the brink;
      Heavy-bellied gulls stare about.
      Low and rough, a drunkard mouths a tune
      Down the old dirt road,
15    Half out of mind---
      A tune the king's players once
      Repeated at the palace.
      "each moment dies and
      Nothing may its breath renew.
20    Yet minute piles on minute
      A solace none wise would dare refuse."
      Whispered low the drunken man
      Near where slept the hound.
      Failed fathers that have failed to deepen
25    The ancient track of an old race
      No bunched mountain's back
      Could have rightly steepened
      Rant at rigor mortis;
      Deep tears eat their faces.
30    Lead bells tell the hour of the house.
      Children blow their candles out.
      Ashes cover the coals.
      Unliving bodies lie heaved to the brink;
      Heavy-bellied gulls stare about.
35    "Out of all slaughter, the one
      Globe sundered by a gash
      Far past the antique wit
      Of Solomon to sew,
      That black day may come
40    And may yet come
      When no high death can save
      A rare daughter or extraordinary son
      From rash disaster
      When we've to destruction come."
45    Whispered low the drunken man
      Near where slept the hind.

      A bald summer and an empty lake return
      Imagination to a childish race
      Past strange muds broken-up by the sun
      Some famous dead indian's grave breathing face
5     Hung its stone arrowhead over as I dug
      Down the sharpening years as the edges mix,
      Rattle blankly in a rich pocket, and repeat
      The one sound early delight had fixed
      In whatever's left of the mind's ground.
10    Unremembered faces are crowding to the top
      Of a mist-covered muddy lake; sharp cries
      Rise and stop. On hands and knees I grope for bones,
      Clacking the blanks, back and forth, back and forth,
      Casually as dominoes, or bullet them
15    Back to mud--- to see how the flesh gasped
      Or must have, ebulliently spilled to stone....
      I watch my life appear as the waters drain,
      As if some restless hand had opened a vein.
      I set all compass by this wrecked shore,
20    Dry blood shelved dryly against a wood;
      Deposited among all that lush scenery once,
      And outfitted for a war, we put on an alien mood.
      Ten years' unholy sweat for change, and after
      What man, bandaged or unbandaged, what man
25    But brought a jungle to his house? There breaks
      Beneath the out-worn branches of the lake
      Some invisible water-bird's penetrating cry.

      OLD MAN Vanquished is the sorrow
                         That rages in my breast;
                         I am too old to care.
                         What passes for the serious
5                        Is a younger man's affair.
                         Loves have burned and leapt between
                         Yet staring doubt announces:
                         Have hands as old as these
                         About a woman's lightness crept?
10       DEMON Rough centuries have trod
                         Your thin spirit out.
                         What can woman's body hold
                         For one who's worn and thin?
      OLD MAN I am an old man, a withered
15                       Stick, lacking all right monument.
         DEMON Lacking all right monument,
                         Gather close what worth you can,
                         Draw your spirit in.
                         For when you lay you down to die
20                       What can she but by you lie?
      OLD MAN Until all, all penalty of God
                         Or eternal mystery forgot,
                         Dissolve paradoxical
                         Into death's bone knot.

      Stands in this sand waste
      An abandoned stone,
      An overturned head a half house high;
      Waters that have flat its cut
5     Vanish as a dream untold.
      But on this head is concentrate
      Intolerable memories
      Of youth grown old.
      I am that bright familiar
10    Wanders through the street
      And banging merchants' windows in
      Must beg for my milk and meat;
      My old face by time betrayed
      To an indistinguishable mass,
15    But when night and wine grow great enough
      I dance on the weedy grass.
      Down this long shore as a boy
      Body and soul were sure
      As any pale, unalterable rock
20    That I now dance before.
      Hands urgent as a hangman's cord,
      All body warped to a board,
      Creep in the salt beneath a face
      Heavy, androgynous.
25    Sliding up through valves of storm
      And mastered by a rage
      The variable sea has seen that form
      Descend from age to age.
      Wind-beaten I but seem,
30    Flat on the wetted sand,
      A derelict, not worth
      The dock-dog's howl or tooth.

      Raised from the proveless dust
      Like a shrouded bird into the sight
      And set tumbling with the rest,
      I daily give wet suck to one
5     That is a barbing brat
      Tangled in my skirts;
      I'll not bother to raise him right
      Lost in the indifferent dust
      Under sky as bruised as that
10    Tumultuous spot that got him;
      But I daily give him suck
      Because he's the nearer dirt.

      In the high tomb, the windows blackened
      A solitary body stretches on its pallet.
      The hush of broken candles, glistening
      Attend the vault of remotest night, listening
5     To the exquisite montage of the moon decieved
      By that which ancienter vocables had revealed.
      Strumpets came bearing like tom-cats in
      The bronzen flesh of him, of him;
      Primping ladies laid the ledgendary body out,
10    Quip on quip, in storied profusion.
      Prepare the touncing oils, maids, to scent
      Vestigal joys that pip the corpse.
      Some backwards catastrophy of the stars
      Looked in, like a forgetful mother,
15    At the voice laid out in state, hugely blue,
      Hacked out as it was from one immenser slab
      While sleepy birds unconscious of their pains pursue
      The day's spontaneous symphony, beneath
      A watery dawn that washes out a sink
20    Full of the moon's bleary oils.

      O I had all of them
      That had all of me,
      A drop of sweat that stung my eye
      Under the old thorn tree;
5     Yet some dark trembling in the blood
      Recalls what troubles me.
      Bloated moon escaped the limbs,
      Night-bird to night-bird called;
      Unknown arms at midnight lift
10    Body and limb appalled
      Into the light-terrifying Heavens.
      Whatever it was it was not God.
      Many men have come again
      Beneath the twisted thorn;
15    Now they but seem as light as breath,
      And love's not worth a stone,
      For there's a greater glory
      Shrieking in my bones.

      Out of woman's weeping womb
      Strode Hitler, Jesus and Michelangelo.

      The wind that lashes everything at once
      Came lashing at the lutanist on evening's hump
      Disturbing chords, flinging river pebbles at his back
      Hunched to deeper strains emerging near his hands
5     In a wind which is a wind and not a motion
      Of elemental ardors making speeches.
      The lutanist deposited hid lute, like so much trash,
      In dusky golds, till gild and gild congealed,
      Shrank, subtracted from each other as they became
10    A part of the haloed wish for a universal whole
      Where lute and lutanist and avenging dusk are plucked
      To one hue, convincing, not permanent, but arranged for, vented,
      In the wind which is a wind and not a motion
      Lashing everything at once.

      Night and fire surround a broken tree
      Made blacker by the fire;
      A head, an arm, barely distinguishable there
      Cant towards a broken sky---
5     Black eyes unwired in the ancient face,
      His old heart's thudding done,
      Hangs that great man who's mind's a sea;
      Red torches gutter tongues.
      Sang the burning lion on the fierce mountaintop.
10    Nor proscenium nor orchestra
      Nor gilded balcony set
      About the vaunting terror of the scene;
      Idiot crawls to idiot
      And idiot begets.
15    And none's alive who'll now recall
      Utter nobleness of limb or sin,
      Beauty beyond a fall.
      Sang the burning lion on the burning mountaintop.
      I picked a blank mask
20    And put on a changing soul,
      Exampled by those blessed men
      Who suffered all in all.
      But I reject the holy past;
      That banner cannot lift again.
25    Forgotten men can't raise a song
      Or change my ranting soul.
      Sang the burning lion on the fierce mountaintop.

      Sang the burning lion from the fierce mountaintop:
      Death's insults emanate from ourselves;
      Terror riven images that complete
      Man and heaven, heart and feet.
5     Scarlet briars in her hair---
      Love from I know not where
      Descends the bitter air.
      Sang the burning lion from the fierce mountaintop:
      The empty prosecution of the skies
10    Stares at a struck stage
      The tired heart derides,---
      Man's best instincts gambled there---
      And the watery heart about to burst
      All lose out to the worst.
15    Sang the burning lion from the fierce mountaintop:
      Beaten man twists his neck to curse,
      White head in heaven
      Golden heart in a hearse---
      A scolded boy or oblong body bends
20    Dark by uncertain suavities of fire to request
      The sea's intercessions.

      God built man in a black fit.
      I tell you suffering a pall;
      Lone men could not fashion it,
      Could not create themselves at all.
5     Heaven itself is what I gate-keep;
      Descended from that sphinx
      Crossed centuries between her paws,
      Another hand has finished me.
      Sang the burning lion on the fierce mountaintop.
10    Emboldened by riches
      A steeple mind had heaped,
      Father son and holy ghost
      In his flaming mind are linked.
      Stale generations that bred him
15    Recanted at the leap;
      Rule square and trine
      But toys to make the typist think.
      Sang the burning lion on the fierce mountaintop.
      A man displaces a woman
20    With the image of her face
      Until some loud stone betokens it,
      Mixing ecstasy and grace.
      A great Adams and Hawthorne knew it,
      Knew it and turned sour;
25    But it is the best that man can do
      Unwound by the backward hour.
      Sang the burning lion on the fierce mountaintop.

      What joy departs the heaving night
      When we stretch out upon the stone
      In momentary bliss;
      Laid like sticks and together bound
5     Indifferent to hurt,
      What love remains?