Dun Madonna, caped and veiled 
      By modest night, the color of shale, 
      Unclench the spools 
      Of moroser weather 
5     Tucked by fingers beneath your vermillion cap. 
       
      Unclench the spools 
      Of angrier rains and redder tornadoes 
      From your tense cap 
10    While the violet moon's sisterly sap 
      Drips bip, and bip, and bap, bap, bap. 
       
      Her slender tongue 
      Unwrapped the whitest portions of the night. 
15    In the hills, green winds prevail.

      One bakes and waits in the roisterous sun 
      Tapping out universal time with a particular foot, 
      A principle shoe, worn leathers unable to reflect 
      The merest shard of all that solar crisis 
5     Burning in the sky and in the apperceiving chest 
      Like boxed jewels winking out of showiest velvets. 
       
      One waits for the desert to be done with itself 
      For the holy sequoias to drop their arms, 
10    One more martyr, torn down by storms, 
      Reduced by the sun to one skull of dreams 
      Throwing one more shadow away from the hill 
      Like a river that flows out of the mind at last. 
       
15    This earth of cakes and sweet excrescences 
      Lets us eat the loam, lick saccharin sands 
      From our lips, taste smeared blazons of cotton candy, 
      Raspberry and chocolate, the florid saps 
      We bite from the tree, laden with glistering fruits 
20    We ourselves have made, and ripened in each eye.

      Less and less sure, O soul, the rain 
      Repeats its residuum 
      Blanking church bells with its ultimate referent: 
      Itself, or some other final thing 
5     That bears the buffets of ceaseless existence 
      Like a paper that rolls over in the wind 
      Or the wind that rolls the paper, which, 
      Startled itself, is full of paper sounds 
      The mud on the moon illumes. 
10     
      The rain is rasping against the panes. 
      A dark, familiar change, 
      Elusive elysium, starts at the edges of the ear, 
      Chewed by flies in a forgetful sun, 
15    Hollow as a father's falsest word 
      Before drunken dinner, sheds its drunkenness 
      On a few, familiar objects. 
       
      What word will ward these mute excursions?

      The pines in their shadows are distinguishing themselves 
      Detached in a softly shaking emptiness 
       
      Separate from themselves and their riveting greens, 
5     Voraciously vivid, beyond coughed words, 
       
      Beyond a last leaf stretched in a last silence 
      Like Hamlet at the vacant end of the meadow, 
       
10    Dying in summer, breathing a last breath 
      In the final rye and grasses, seeing the trees loud sway 
       
      At the rim of the yellow field, shaken 
      Softly, softly, following a blue track through the pines.

      Standing a long time before the pond, in November 
      Standing and looking at nothing 
       
      Or looking and forgetting it is oneself that looks 
5     One begins to think 
       
      That the sinewy residue at the bottom of the pond 
      And the pond, and one's consciousness of the pond 
       
10    Moving over it like an enigmatic cloud 
      Are one, that the famous watery veils are no longer 
       
      Waiting to be torn, or that, torn already, 
      They have left only these sinewy shreds, 
15     
      Gluey blacks thinly dispersed in the space 
      Between the self, astutely observing, 
       
      And the brown pane of water that lifts the clouds 
20    And the bottom of the pond.

      Calmed lightnings in the evening sky 
      Shuttle, like warm humans, from sty to sty. 
       
      If ever there were an evening readiest 
5     For comparisons, gilded in flashes, half real, 
       
      It is this evening, blotched by light, 
      Spumed with cloudy figures of our imagining. 
       
10    And so the erratic discharges of our thoughts 
      Are themselves significant, 
       
      Indicative perhaps of the circuits that we make 
      Circling one disaster and another catastrophe, 
15     
      Symptoms of a discord so profound, 
      Malevolent fragrances of black, pitted things, 
       
      That long_fruited hopes have withered, and everlasting airs 
20    Crimp their silvery middles tiredly 
       
      And the brazen horizon awes us a little less 
      With its simmering magnificence 
       
25    Dull a little, and a little cold even in summer, 
      Shunted to one side a little, and old and used. 
       
      Wormy lightnings, restore the discords of your colorings; 
      These are the makings of our end.

      What has life's bitter disappointment brought 
      Laid in a narrow, breathless bed? 
      Shall we curse all our drunken, muddy lot 
      Lain with long bones of the dead? 
5      
      At the end of a rifle or parting stream 
      Pursued by a pursuing dream 
      Man wakes up to find his enemies again, 
      The end of dreams, and all friends dead. 
10     
      What stays hid in the marrow there, 
      Thrust deep underground? 
      Things purposed in the unpurposed air 
      Die when those men are dead. 
15     
      Whether father or brother still pursue 
      Their work, or others' work, I do not know; 
      I read it on a narrow, upright stone 
      Cast by the long bones of the dead. 
20     
      Fathers sacrifice long_loving sons 
      To a nameless, breathless bed; 
      Stand we under an island sun 
      Or lie with long bones of the dead?

      Does the moon sail in its sumptuous heaven 
      Disfigured by pity, 
      Blindly tearful in an icy lair? 
       
5     To walk in the moonlight, to trod 
      The verdant ambers, and to think of nothing, 
      What sort of matter for a poem is that? 
       
      Is it a matter of having nothing 
10    In the mind, icy sequester 
      Of nothing, of nothingness layered in its own absence? 
       
      Or is it a matter, rather 
      Of nothingness icily conceived, icily meant? 
15    It is a matter of sinister consequence. 
       
      To walk in the violet moonlight 
      Discussing the moon from which it flares 
      Disfiguring the roses 
20     
      Is a kind of nothing, a suave 
      Hollowness that we may hold near 
      Or suspend between us as we walk. 
       
25    O savage celestial, misty moon, 
      Snarling in your lair, speak, 
      If speak you must, in dismal syllables 
       
      Some more blatant human meaning.

      Disconsolate in the deepening weather 
      Of a miserable December, 
      Cincinnatus made a house of song 
      Pinching out the solar imperative 
5     From other, more miraculous strains 
      That salted the winter air 
      And coated the simple ice on the porch. 
       
      Without aids in impossible weather, 
10    Cincinnatus made a house of song 
      And took up, in primitive measure, 
      A primitive abode.

      Picaresque birds cry hi-yi-hi 
      From the lustered branch 
      Festooned with ants. 
       
5     Crocodiles mustered in the bayou 
      Flutter melodious tails 
      Under oaks. 
       
      Captains of the stratosphere march high, march high 
10    Stepping the squalid dews 
      Of gaudiest clouds. 
       
      When the marshal of the swamp cries hi-yi-hi 
      It is his essences' valence 
15    Neatly strummed.

      You can see the earth shake, no doubt, 
      Its myriad images 
      In your broken glass. 
      You can feel it, no doubt, 
5     In your tenebrous nails. 
      Or in the nervous laughter that the sky 
      Shakes down. 
      Pointed voice, mixing blues and browns 
      In a vivid mash that riffles the eye, 
10    These solids, and these, 
      Remain impenetrable. 
       
      O how I regret not having killed 
      The mouse in my childhood. 
15     
      Enfold me, lucid muds, 
      I would go cloaked in earth the way a duck 
      Dons water.

      Oh let the light be broken 
      That soaked and solemn 
      Out of the sun's mouth spoken 
      Climbed the virgin's hide 
5     And the grave of her face. 
      Be buried in the stolen stone 
      Each word of sight 
      That from the tongue's priested 
      Memory is severed 
10    Hunkered in the seed of the cold. 
      Oh let the light be broken 
      Over shackled genesis 
      Until the husks have spoken 
      Word and weed and sizzling stem 
15    Out of the grave of her face 
      Alive again, and the once burning 
      Turn of the world 
      Stumbles back to ochre. 
      Let man and woman and infant dread 
20    Out of harrowed heart 
      Lain long and solemn 
      Step from the narrow incision 
      Speaking in leap years 
      The carved distresses 
25    Scourged in the drop of a tear's face 
      Hanging and grieving 
      After its home of fruit 
      Under bruited tree 
      Bruised and fishnet against the sky 
30    Solemnly detached as a leaf's face 
      Ghosted on stones 
      Waiting for the last hanged man 
      To dive alive at last.

      Is it a death of the self, or of the self's 
      One projection, fatal ray, deadliest beam 
       
      Unfolding from out of a stillness the self contains 
5     Like scissors, or a dove's placid wings, abruptly flown 
       
      From brooded palms, this quiet that returns 
      To the stone house, empty and white 
       
10    In a whiter air? Something deeply tired 
      Has taken the place of the cows, 
       
      Still morose, filling the entire structure 
      With placid breaths, but what is it? 
15     
      Is there, in this fix of airs, an extinguishing anguish 
      That broods from the barn, the tired reds 
       
      Falling in the air under a Dutch hex 
20    And a soggy roof buckled by the weather, 
       
      Something that ticks in the empty hayrick 
      Or yawns from the creosote timbers 
       
25    Leaning together a little in the space left 
      By the solemn breathing of the cows?

      Socketless and sailor 
      In the world's winded veins 
      Scented genesis and coffinsilk 
      I mock the soberest cockerel 
5     Diving from the prism_spitting 
      Pinnacle of the world's mast 
      Uselessly singing 
      And rant like a wronged girl 
      All my sweetest notes 
10    Over ignorant houses 
      Slumbered in death and morning light. 
       
      Out of the closeted shout this echo beats 
      Features of a sinning man on tin 
15    More pressed to anguish in a dial's sigh 
      Than any victim of time heretically cried 
      Has been bludgeoned by suns 
      Or a pauper's bliss been 
      Crimped in a penny's fear 
20    Or any tale of the world 
      Cauled in a scorpion's sting 
      Has twisted its smile on a man's side 
      Or any climbed tirade 
      Spoken in wishes 
25    That nature's weary fabulist 
      Set down. 
       
      Graveturning in wishes 
      As a wish is a kiss 
30    My manbones shriek 
      In blooded inks 
      Out of a rage welled and calmed 
      As any bird's ratcheted turn 
      Over the thumbing sea at dawn 
35    Crawls at clouds 
      In inching desire as each wingbeat clips 
      Over measured cessations 
      Chewing ships and bones to flour. 
       
40    Out of each brick 
      The cold dawn shakes 
      And each root tooth of daisies 
      Cragged in the fingering spring 
      Floods pulse and fever 
45    To ramshackle gods agog 
      As saints in whispers 
      Each aghast their closed wings keep 
      Singing of statuary 
      And the boiling joy 
50    Of the devil's boyish kiss. 
       
      So I this saintly mort cry down 
      And each nailed lip kiss 
      Quagmired in hatred 
55    Tried and hung, on pentecostal cross and hatch 
      Birthing the blood plant 
      Insisting in stitches 
      For this world the word's wound. 
      So I, crumbling on windfall, 
60    On sold bones and the tarot told 
      Watch hatred disaster, man and god fall, 
      And all loved things end.

      The sun, scintillating cadaver, 
      Refusing blue, or mauve, or sincerer purple 
       
      For the great step he was to make that day 
5     Entirely out of himself and into the world 
       
      Where dull mauves congeal, purples espouse darkly, 
      And blues irresolutely go blank, 
       
10    Unpacked his scalding instruments in the dark 
      Listening to the machinery of crickets, grown tired, 
       
      The imperceptible brrr 
      Of cold discomfort that enmeshed their foils 
15     
      And, tired himself, threw the rude cash of light 
      In the moon's urinal.

      The butler of the weather, 
      Essential lumin on a globe gone dark, 
      Parsed us out upon the table 
      With a certain ceremonious, filial delicacy. 
5      
      What we were we were, without detail, 
      And so was he, tracing his investigations out 
      The way a dachshund traces the motivating fuel 
      Of furtive foxes darkly red. 
10     
      Even so, rising to its perch 
      A bird of poignant recitations 
      Cries sky and sky and sky 
      In American barrenness. 
15     
      Each thing in the evening tried to find  
      What sort of thing it was, and how it had arrived 
      In the evening of which it was somehow a part 
      As stars descended 
20     
      Over Florida.

      When the house stands empty, the rooms disgorged 
      Of all the crumpled laundry daily life imposes 
       
      How conditional our maundering sorrows seem, 
5     Another routine, like sleep and death, 
       
      Engaging our restless spirits 
      As soccer in Brazil, the overnight weather, 
       
10    The uninhabited chair, weighted with fringes, 
      That stares in the leaning mirror morbidly 
       
      Or the dirty shovel that leans in the garage, 
      A little old and uselessly, by a mended fishnet.

      One has lived long enough 
      Among rusted hills, and the solemn sunlight 
       
      Spinning its steel shadows out of itself 
5     Over those hills, thickly gathered at the arbor 
       
      Where matted vines still move on the latticework, 
      Purple embrasures, seeming almost to speak 
       
10    In a light that is constantly fading, 
      Shifting its emphasis, a sliding center 
       
      That creeps over partial hills, 
      Real where revealed, invisible elsewhere 
15     
      Full of hidden masses and interior kisses 
      The way a sliver of grass is an entire field of grass, 
       
      The way a man represents a man, 
20    Without feeling, in the inhuman landscape.

      The native muse of this rock 
      Wakes dumbly in the morning mist, and in the garden, 
       
      Attaches itself to a cockerel by thin tins 
5     Of light from the bleakest planet; 
       
      Wakes, and stumbles about the house in a robe, having misplaced 
      Dawn's engines, the consciousness of a dawn 
       
10    In the folded dark of sleep, last night 
      When, by the bedstand, it seemed a few syllables had made life cohere. 
       
      The native muse of this rock, dumbly awake, 
      Preens against an obliterating light.

      On undemanding ground 
      Shot through with hollow sounds 
      Bird or bullet make 
      Or some other keen cry, I take 
5     This man for model, though in truth 
      A small man of the town; and although 
      His grandfather was a thief 
      And his father worse than that, 
      I respect his grief, for what else can I 
10    That wander in the clay? 
       
      There was a man had died 
      Frozen to the mountainside 
      And, nothing in his climbing pack 
15    And less upon his withered back, 
      He ascended the wintry peak 
      Sang a rich bar tune and died. 
      It was out of pride 
      The old man had died. 
20    He gripped a flute, knew God's great lie, 
      And had a clarity in the eye. 
       
      And at the last, a damned wretched gaiety 
      Suffused his frame. 
25    Mountain echo upon echo 
      Hollowed out his fame; 
      Dying, trying once again 
      To empty himself of troubles by the score--
      "This joy of death 
30    Stops the breath"
      In the trees, excited laughter; 
      And after, the silence.

      The builder of cellos in solar weather 
      Extracts a suavity from knots, true trills 
      That mock the swilling catbird in his royal chair. 
      But from what seed increased the pilfered wood? 
5     Farm boys and their milky maids grown old 
      Must, as hale timbers rudely weathered, 
      Must strain, and crack, and, in their scale, break 
      Remoter love's fiercest chord, dwindling 
      At length as even the grandest cock 
10    Goes rolling, listlessly, on to noon. 
       
      II 
      Blue rabbis without hats are chasing still 
      What rabbis, bending at their lamps, construe 
15    To be the bright perennial, in renewing hues 
      Emerging, out of so much ephemeral dust. 
      Hearers of thunder in their flamenco capes 
      Make much of its minor terrors and mimic hate; 
      Dividing time between one disaster 
20    And another catastrophe, that kills, 
      They are like drowned rabbis beholding doom 
      In a stoven ship of their own imagining 
      While blazing fish peek about their bones.

      Every day there was a little less of himself, 
      A moon of diminishing hues, 
       
      Less and less, as he strode from the balustrade 
5     To the roses, each night a different leaf fallen, 
       
      Each day a new ambivalence in the sun's assertions, 
      Proverbial gold in a stale world 
       
10    Where the water tasted tinny and the tap spat 
      Erratic chuffs of water in an empty cup 
       
      And something or other had died a day earlier, 
      Had died and had its poor death recorded, 
15     
      Less and less itself, or its wintery twin, 
      Pacing from the terrace to the garden.