Terrible Beauty
“the white wind rase
All but the bright stones wherein our smiling plays”
(”Possessions,” Hart Crane).
“Where cedar leaf divides the sky
I heard the sea.”
“The evening was a spear in the ravine
That throve through very oak.”
“fleeing
Under the constant wonder of your eyes–”
“Sand troughed us in a glittering abyss.
A serpent swam a vertex to the sun
–On unpaced beaches leaned its tongue and drummed.
What fountains did I hear? what icy speeches?”
Since Jill in Oxford said maybe I have nothing to say I have wondered and believed it–despite my previous faith that each person has all that he can to say–that it depends on style and desire and need. But I have become more self-evaluative.
Not for me were these buildings created
Or for me, who does not know it?
The dream city I beheld was space for me
the scrolls and pediments–the paradise of art
Individual temperament and genius as light
falls in a room–the fire falls dim and is
covered–what is left–from this smoky furnace
we cast our scraps to purity climbing
star ward holding new senses and flaming
colors and a sense of the day which is
high like the best dream of a city in real
space–timeless–in the dream and wondering
does this shade barely resemble the mind
which quivers and embraces the forms
so vast–ununderstandable & never wanting to
be known–take care of health and the
dreams may come slow and true with joy–
Get as lost in the transport of creation as the bird spinning skyward into new flight, as the sticky green leaf showing in first light. I know the days can be as great and unafraid as bright words softly and lovely can sing, whiz through the pursed lips human and trembling, as new things appear in the dream–endless like the sweep of the eye down the Arno as it disappears in a wisp of orange smoke reflected on a window never opened by me.
I know weeping patiently you in the bed I can’t lie in are warm and worthwhile–worth loving and hugging.
I have that worth offering to give.
I have that worth receiving to give.
Go away ugly-man-like women I say!
Let’s not theorize during breakfast
or Mozart or Cezanne
I am lean as Cassius–and plotting on a way
to gain happiness and beauty–pleasure that
lasts–lean and thin–not the Jolly type
Active and Alert my temperament plots
Maybe we need to sometimes
You and I between the books
I saw deep deep into your peerless eyes
The love that flattered there was spun
and clouded thick
You could be to me that one worth the
truth to consider–
Or I could love your breasts and your thin wild smile
lean my hungry lips lean on you again
In Europe I can bring that light alive
If you want to see even that which I have not
But in my dreams marvelous
things have happened–
And I think
they could repeat themselves
in this world I wake into
every lazy morning
Nietzsche lived and thought as
I do now an artist–one
who I am sure as D. H. Lawrence
considered himself a poet foremost
and now off to the play.
John Berryman writing poems
all night in Cafe’s after seeing
movies with his wife-to-be.
All night forcing poetry and letting
poetry fly–working and then
reviving with Lear–new poems
other poet friends–who just
decided–attempted poetry.
Myself drinking coffee for the
first time missing sleep to
revive my poetic flow the
high of scribbling new things
the terrible beauty being born in the distance
across the room: Helena Micheletti’s
Near Eastern Syrian high-browed beauty