Because I am old and refuse my death
      I have been bitter and I've been kind;
      Skeletal bitterness my enmities shook,
      Kindness flowed from head to foot.
5     But of all those wind-gaunt faces
      I have worn as if strapped in the traces
      I most adore the look
      Of an old withered apple, its withdrawn glance,
      All sweetness concentrated
10    To an unrelenting taste:
           An old bitten rind, bitten rind.
      But because I am bitter
      And dislike the taste
      Of joys overblown in any wind
15    I have come to sing in the waste
      Of an old bitten rind:
      "Bitten rind, bitten time,
      Under stars or under sky
      The right emotion of a dirty crook
20    Has nobleness to bless or curse,
      Confirm or rescind the pledge
      Made by our bodies as they lie
      Under this dirty hedge."
           An old bitten rind, bitten rind.
25    Having tasted thus
      The fruit of an obscure look
      Or the sharp meaning of a song
      Under dull words in a book
      I laugh at all awhile
30    And I myself forsake;
      For nothing's worth the riddle
      And no man's worth his wake,
      I stole a blind man's fiddle
      And sing what I forsake.
35         An old bitten rind, bitten rind.
      I have nothing but am a queen:
      Monstrosities sworn must heel
      Forced by a hand unseen
      As dog to its master's whistle wheels.
40    And although I am a great queen
      With stars on my fingers for rings
      And although I dance like a drunk
      And with the seen and unseen wink
      I am driven by passion to sing:
45         An old bitten rind, bitten rind.

      The cardinal his scarlet vigil keeps
      That had no sin but singing;
      How much more should we march in grief
      That have said and done such things?
5     The azalea extends its wild branch
      Against a wild sky; nearby
      Some libertarian pamphlet flaps
      Ignored by some more sodden door.
      A child is singing in the bright march air
10    Some tune his father sung---
      Abstracted with the politics
      Of that disastrous, forgotten war.
      "The soldier will soon be waking
      That fed on dreams before;
15    A man kills a man that killed;
      All happens as before."

      An azalea climbed up
      Into a silver cup,
      And blossoming died
      While the bee had sup.

      Toiling in dawn's orange forge
      I hammer at the gorge
      Of silent kings and laughless queens.
      They come to me for pretty things,
5     Pretty things;
      I have imagination's means.
      But the farther that I thrust
      That art I cannot trust
      Into the aching spirit's pyre
10    The more my hand is burnt and hurt
      By earthly fires.

      What ache first calls us from rest,
      Bids us rise and dress
      As if all were solemn consequence?
      The mind that ages in its fears,
5     Grows tired, rants and tears,
      As if every thought were sense?
      Until heart and soul and all
      Are beaten out of gold,
      No dying triumph's made.
10    Until eye and mind first sprout
      Golden tenderness, there is nothing out
      That cannot fade.

      They study at a school
      Where waves are crest on crest,
      The fish half in the air
      As if the highest were the best.
5     But every brooding oyster knows
      And every whale that spouts
      That although their high heaven glows
      Its because the water has run out.

      I desire to cast desire away,
      Having all that blamed respect
      Due my old age, hurled burning away
      Until I into the naked grass have crept.
5     I recall how some sage hermit spoke,
      Under his mountain drift lodged alone,
      Of how all changing waters must
      Whirl up to the stone.
      But I am wrecked by discourse
10    Of the sacred and profane;
      All love draws back to its source,
      Dry enmities remain.

      Patched out of forgotten things
      Old clothes and old stories and old grey rugs
      I have sewn my sable wings
      And soar where solemn things are bugs.
5     But perhaps where blood falls
      From the human heart
      And wall gives on to wall
      Is the right altitude for art.

      We've been shooting strangers
      Over waters and the wild;
      But conscience is forgotten
      In the tearing wind.
5     We stood up in battlements of dust
      To cut down what would live:
      "Worms and tyrants all must die---"
      Nothing was as pleasure is.
           Said a dark voice hid in the bush.
10    The mob is filled with insane joy,
      The banners in the street
      Hang from pole and lamppost
      Hang ripe like butchered meat.
      What happiness or bliss is there
15    In conversing with a face
      Uncle Sam has painted blank
      For every circumstance?
           Said a dark voice hid in the bush.
      In a folded tent there's room
20    For filching treachery;
      Standing near, the slaughter's done
      We'll collect an oiled fee.
      Dead men lie face down in bed,
      A hole in every spine;
25    How goes the empire's rate
      When we to cowardice decline?
           Said a dark voice hid in the bush.
      What if great Washington lived,
      That stern face breathing near,
30    What thoughtless sentence then
      Transform to pleas our cheers?
      Nothing was as pleasure is,
      And God's a neglected child;
      We've been shooting strangers
35    Over waters in the wild.
           Said a dark voice hid in the bush.

      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.
      What stays hid in the marrow there,
10    Thrust deep underground?
      Things purposed in the unpurposed air
      Die when those men are dead.
      Whether father or brother still pursue
      Their work, or others' work, I do not know;
15    I read it on a narrow, upright stone
      Cast by the long bones of the dead.
      Fathers sacrifice long-loving sons
      To a nameless, breathless bed;
      Stand we under an island sun
20    Or lie with long bones of the dead?

      Some with horse-gestures and spiritual breath,
      A fine noble neck that will not bend;
      A fiery eye; talk that did not fade.
      Alteration upon alteration given
5     No approving stamp, but in the house fine things 
      Are kept. All is done as was done before.
      Those few by right of rank
      By every right that nature knows,
      That contain such ancestry and grace,
10    Noble pause in speech and haughty face
      That in manor-house or tenement the tradition's kept;
      All remembered gaiety and high shows.
      Enmities mended that would wreck the worst;
      Beautiful things; beautiful books among the plates;
15    A bell that calls the spirit home.
      All words a ritual word or look, or some
      Action presaged in story or high song.
      All is done as was done before.

      Perfumed Lavosier sniffed
      A new world in, sighed a new one out.
      Caravaggio's rearing horse proclaimed
      Modern divinity.
5     Peter Seller's gardener lost
      Compounded man and holy host.
      The Giant in the cradle
      Some sweet sanctity retains.

      I've watched the swan withdraw
      To the sky's timid zone;
      And out of that sweet ether
      Fashion a dying call.
5     I know not whether,
      My time being sprung,
      I shall endure together
      To sing that last song.

      When my voice is a troubled cup
      Who'll know my face?
      My wounds then sew up
      My scolding done?
5     What lover listen
      To what I say?
      Clean bones glisten
      Under rank decay.

      "Capacious imagination's faces fete my famishing,
      take tea from a voice, a ghostly pour of steam
      rising and soliloquizing, misting the thirsty features
      drowned in their own pool of too-deep selfknowing.
5     Unhandsome Hawthorne, with a vibrant lie
      and victorian necktie, I guess my susurrations linger
      over trashed vowels, marked harmonies giving
      my fine Irene her double edge of softness;
      how, sometimes, the right face can mean salvation!
10    Howled down at the Imperial for my tea-tragedy last night,
      too cinnamon-delicate for the masses' meat,
      I know how our bodies will meld before our minds vanish....
      Driving like a marathoner out of London into the foggy future,
      the lifted Dover cliffs swelling the meridian
15    and loving my new auto's purring reach into the nebulous,
      I watch for constellations past the turning wheel while
      the shaky rearview mirror gives an intruding look."

      And there was one
      Had taken up a song
      Could not put it down again,
      His heart had been harrowed
5     So deeply and so long.
      And there was one
      Had a fine frenzy in his eye
      And leapt from blazing hillock to hillock
      In his mind, his imagination striding
10    Dionysian, above the plains.
      And was there one
      Renewed all anguish in a thought
      Or with his burning blood made all the causes stop?
      His heart had meditated silence
15    So deeply and so long.

      The sky is blue.
      The blue man in the blue sky is blue.
      There will never be a stop to the monotony
      In all this abiding blue.
5     The undulations in Uruguay
      Affect the meditations
      Of Mrs Rhinoceros
      Eating her ferina in highest fashion.
      Macabre puppets of Anaxamander
10    Hanging lank in the spindled air
      Interrupt the impecunious questionings
      Of Peter asleep among the dorm's susurrations.
      Dripping dreams of doubters on the rocks,
      Their drub drub drub in blackest drams,
15    Falling among rocks
      Scatters cats in Tulsa, Oklahoma.
      And never in Atlantic City
      O Never in Atlantic City
      Will there ever be a stop to the monotony
20    In all this abiding blue.

      Before the geese upon the water have begun their day,
      Before cold dawn could allay the winter's deep dream of May,
      Or any symbolical host fly out of the dark, as it must,
      The thoughtful song, drawn like yarn out of a beggar's breast,
5     And which had illuminated pride, so weak was the world's way,
      Unseen ages, like the bird with the silver ball for a soul,
      Died dreaming in that beggar's breast, before he could awake 
           from the dust.

      Some say heaven is a rest,
      Bright clouds can close out light;
      But I differ with that crowd
      And contend my midnight's best.
5     All men are dust and must pluck their theme
      From passing circumstance---
      All that agony but a dying dream
      Unless it make a farmhand dance.
      The dervish and his spinning lash,
10    His tongue twisted in trance,
      Repeats his antic rant before
      God's whirling face.
      Loveliness unbridled bore
      No such look as that;
15    When heaven claps its bony wings
      Individuation is forgot.
      But unpopulated heaven,
      Bare sky among blank fronds,
      Floods my rebel keel from even---
20    Sudden with intemperate blood.
      Robbed of vision I can feel
      No palpable delight,
      But stark hands that catch at escaping heels
      Clasping in the night.

      In zero air
      By the jaguars caged in their griefs
      And landrovers digging up bones in the park,
      Dirt salts the dime-hole of her going.
5     By liquid cats,
      Emptied of minutes and prayers in the waking zoo,
      Both half animal and man in my shambling frame
      I pace to praise the honored hour of her death.
      Her grave grows hair
10    And gravel marks the shadow where I walk,
      Freezing among moonbeams, while the icicles' stalks
      Rise from eye to eye in the blizzard's blast.
      Now how unsound
      By the gold-honoured straws of dawn unbound
15    And looped from the walking category of sorrow
      By a drake's water-shilled beak do I stand and cry?

      "Wheeled cradled, blank-faced and blue-brained
      to the hospital chapel, I watch the ivory pastor's hands
      trace shadow rabbits in the air under the florescent cross
      and list my sins in silence as he drones redemption;
5     maybe St. Peter will greet me in heaven with a new guitar.
      Something babbles into static as my stroked-out arm relaxes...
      A tumor dripping ink now fills my mind, a black bud
      swelling to blood-blossom, ready to costume me in blood---
      Stalking back from the guillotine like a 50s zombie
10    blitzed on my first part in the Bs, I wake
      socketed in the NMR chamber like a bullet
      waiting for the green light to flit my diagnosis
      on the big screen, the chart a map of Europe.
      I lay enlarged; drugged and irradiated like a fallen fruit.
15    I still laugh when I hear a democrat's ill.
      I was worse: my perennial, emboldened
      humor ramping like a bull, I crooned Dukakis is bald
      from my black Marshall stacks for the innocent fetuses
      at the Republican convention, dating Miss America still....
20    I'm sorry I kicked his Greek hynee. Sorry for all that."

      We have many problems,
      Both violence and drouth;
      Plagues upon our people,
      Plagues stuffed in our mouths.
5     Democracy abandons men
      That lack remembrance;
      Behind us another mountain
      Crowds a fresh sky.
      Day in, day out,
10    All the businessmen are stout.
      Politicians of utopia
      From every gutter shout:
      'Join hands against the common slope
      A better world will out.'
15    The strong man has his answer
      To the dream of a perfect state:
      'Strike him without swerving,
      Lay him out upon the slates!'
      Day in, day out,
20    All the businessmen are stout.
      Arjuna on the streetcorner
      Sipping at his smoke
      Knows the daily death of friends,
      Knows it for no hoax.
25    What of all that rant and hiss
      Will strike him as sense?
      What blue Krishna whisper
      He died before for this?
      Day in, day out,
30    All the business men are stout.

      Was there carnage in that shot
      World-leveling God begot?
      Stubborn Christ born in an abandoned lot.
      Old cross crows are drubbing in the dust.
5     Cracked heaven the dividing splinter teared,
      All that riotous confusion heard
      Before the roaring droplet seared.
      Old cross crows are drubbing in the dust.
      Did that staring infant's head
10    Dimly unwrapped above the stiff bed
      Know what it engendered?
      Old cross crows are drubbing in the dust.
      Pack-animals' musty blood
      Flubbed responsive where they stood,
15    Deep in the passionless mystery.
      Old cross crows are drubbing in the dust.
      And was that woman bleeding there
      As in a tapestry, for the crawling god prepared?
      All generation in a wound condoned.
20    Old cross crows are drubbing in the dust.
      Did that penitential infant shriek
      Climbing heaven's empty cheek
      Draw ecstatic thunder down?
      Old cross crows are drubbing in the dust.

      Now that she is no longer young
      There is less of her
      In the measures of the birds;
      The partridges give voice
5     Less sweetly, and the rose
      Grips more blackly the earth
      Now that she is no longer young.
      Now that she is no longer young
      Do new ships and unfinished men walk lost,
10    The crippled dog mew at its wounds,
      And the sun go sick to bed each night?
      Does her pleading face fade away
      From its passion like this age
      Now that she is no longer young?
15    I do not know because I am blind
      To crudities of the compass point
      Or the minor perihelions of the sun.
      Enzymes of their medicines cannot chart
      The chemic regions of her skies;
20    The needle on the encephalograph
      Shakes no glory from her eye.

      Once manservant and now no king
      Since she the served and sweeping blast
      Has hurdled death's ribbed gates again, slipped past
      The soft portals opening and entered
5     The severed countries of the twanging grass.
      All ants and minotaurs, and each graved thing
      Is of its wicked pulse ice emperor
      Under green stars flying backwards and the foreshortened blast
      Of horse-headed winds that neigh each eye shut
10    Loping its crooked trot to dark.
      Once queen in the skyey seconds of my breath
      With no pale maids attending, and now
      A girl with a hollow where her breasts had been
      I crawl into the hours of my grief, and lie
15    In the rose lacquer of her lying-down breath.
      Once haunted god by the ramshackle barn
      Caved in centuries of twilight and worsted rust
      I rummage the windings of this moment's moss
      Bite the sands of our last hidden kiss
20    And breathe all ways at once your lost breath.

      I
      When Twyla Tharp begins again
      Her own sweet body to command,
      Charm of personality or face must vanish
5     Into the reality of pattern.
      Soldiers lined up pidgeon-toed
      At the mosque, shot out their enemies' heart.
      What lies still beating in the cart?
      Was there passion in that slaughter?
10    II
      There was a dream of feasting, and we fed on dreams.
      Instinct in the sculptor's palsied hand
      Creates where it divides, eating to the face of man
      As if stone were so much rotten wood.
15    Although young, it seemed all dignity must be spent
      On sinking love or suborned monument.
      Where was the gamble if the loss lacked reality?
      We were young and solemn and did what we would.

      So I might suffer without fail the vengeance of leaves
      Crumbling, vein by vein, to the docks of autumn's dust
      And burn again in a rasping year
      My fled blood
5     Both woke and broke
      Flood and voice over the sea-turning town.
      So that the wail of the crickets might knock and enter
      Each sad shadow passage of the pulse
      I woke
10    Burning in the shining rivers that skip out of sight.
      In the helping hurt of the one-armed weather
      Flinging hailstones and adders
      Down the ocean-thieving tunnel of the sky
      Against this head
15    I swore all summer dumb
      While the ministering crickets in the booming grass
      Chanted phylums of my blood about to be said
      And I stood in the summer's drum
      Surrounded
20    By the roaring going of the year.
      Ignorant of thistlery we walked in our mystery
      Arm in arm like the burning boughs
      Friends against death in the summer's long breath,
      And like the sun we sauntered
25    Drunk and wandered
      Through the closed book of the heart;
      And I was sky and sunlight in the chapters of the grass.
      And understanding
      I sang:
30    Oceans in acorns my strumming mermaids are.

      Virtuous beggars into cold dawn swarm
      To chill their heated flanks.
      How do I know that they were warm?
      They had no stitch of clothing on.

      If I were the son of God
      And out of that grand house came
      Tumbling with lions
      On Heaven's bursting lawn,
5     At breakneck dawn I'd race
      From grave to cradle again
      Until to a moldy house I crept
      And turn the last clod.

      "A seed of knowing out of our ignorant fruit must drop.
      My pear tree, not Sartre's, rises from the wrong ground,
      blossoms and rots in God's green affections;
      memorizing Cicero all afternoon, the lagging speeches,
5     a fist of pebbles in my mouth, shouting at the sea....
      a carpet-bagging stumper after my sweet fee.
      We threw the golden teardrops uneaten to the hogs---
      all boys and wickedness leaping Huck Finn's fence
      whitewashed in North Africa. The orchard door
10    yawned on darkness as we exited, loaded down
      and laughing: reality in the act, not the scenery.
      A tentacle of happiness, not nausea, gripped me then
      coiling my black heart in light like an extra aorta,
      fibrous and alive and dangling from God's omnipresence."

      Not the politician in his coterie
      Surmounting an elaborate chair---
      A simple, elegant glass
      Choked in his unconscious fist,
5     Nor revolutionary lunatic
      Standing tip-toe on the quay
      To out-face the beating sea
      (And has not the courage
      To stand half at ease)
10    Has a fanatic eye
      Or golden stomach enough
      To sweat out the divine
      Night after night, or lick
      From all this tragic human stuff
15    Some shrinking taste
      Of the glittering sublime.

      Now I am old
      In body and bone
      My stone muse sings
      Proud and alone.
5     But when I was young
      My muses stood
      Medusa-struck
      And drained of blood.
      Neither face nor body danced
10    On the barren grass
      Of the white seashore,
      All their stony terror glued in a glance.
      All that I had planned
      And placed apart
15    In the sacred mysteries of the heart
      Sunk like a stone in the lost sea.
      All the beautiful pride of her speech
      That had seemed, so far above death was it flung,
      The haughty original of chance
20    Closed in dark colloquy and muddied breath.

      Say whatever turned round in Plato's skull
      Or mounted Mary Magdalene's heart, St Teresa's chest,
      Pours quickly away; chill vapors dispersed by day.
      Say chance is in our substance and makes us free.
5     Say whatever terror that holds man by the throat
      Is shed by accidental antidote. That St John in pan's cavern dwelt.
      Vast plans that had Caesar's mind for habitation
      Or in Hitler's bunker slept, and map by map were built,
      Were map by map and town by town disintegrated.
10    Say chance whirls in the demons strength or thought threw out.
      Who knows but that chance is projected indecision,
      Petty habits of the mind grown great, great thoughts grown worse.
      What do we know of history and fate? Did Venus,
      Who knew Adonis' worth, imbibe his dead sperm for bitterness?
15    What in her belly purred? What from the great legs leapt?

      The world enlarged from a shell
      Is stripped and standing bare,
      A grinding dancer on a stage,
      Violent with despair
5     And sweet to look upon.
      Is not every lovely thing,
      All gauzy prettiness and hidden force veiled
      And held from revelation as destruction
      By gyring chance
10    By delicate strings?

      Because I am blind and walk agape
      And beat out rough rhythm with my stick
      Like the fascination of the sea
      I can create, as in Yeats' dream,
5     Man in the soul of God
      And batter out a place 
      Among twilit immensities
      To dwell in that contempt,
      Giving bitterness a face.
10         Stick, stick, stick, stick.
      Because I am a blind old man
      And came blindly howling hence
      To fumble with a stick, I demand,
      Passion of my decrepitude unsung,
15    A gallery where bright heroes hung
      Stand each for that passion
      That pitched them to their deaths;
      And I demand it built
      Behind the eye and in the heart
20    Of God and his burning son;
      All glory in the uneaten bud.
           Stick, stick, stick, stick.
      I have heard on the walks and ways
      That give my confession to a stone
25    That some with bitter inward breaths
      And some in necessity of fashion
      Live slave to what words have wrung
      Out of man's contemptible mash
      And nail to each star each part,
30    As if misery made flesh were all.
           Stick, stick, stick, stick.
      I can see because I am blind
      How each tiresome human vine
      In eyeless arrogance of its kind
35    Sprouts like a worm in its own food,
      Divine soul all lumped with mud.
      Each blind root heaves its back to the sun
      In perilous ignorance of its own blood.
           Stick, stick, stick, stick.
40    Although I am blind and cannot see
      Bleak wreckage of the dark tide,
      Rank human ecstasies and defeats,
      I know what mysteries abide
      And carve these rude words upon my stick:
45    We must feed what we beget;
      Imagination shall provide
      Some unsought froth as yet, rank spillage
      Of the glittering sublime.
           Stick, stick, stick, stick.

      The climbing rose upon the tree
      Is symbol enough for me;
      That chaliced eye weeping blood,
      Proponent of diviner love.
5     All the glory my old age needs
      A fisher-girl provides.
      What care I if angels, angels shove?
      Love's a lump of sodden clay.
      I am content with what I can catch
10    And let the others pass.
      Old hearts and broken kettles sigh,
      Love's a sodden lump of clay.
      What care I for the spite of time
      That makes the humble bite their tongues
15    Or loftier spirits trudge
      Through burning lime?
      The climbing rose upon the tree
      Is symbol enough for me.

      These gifts' attendance now allay
      And renew these broken eyes with day.
      What picture in the mind can make me rail,
      Now so out of love to overwhelm?
5     Can one so old still declaim and rage,
      Let passion's mask drop or burn a stage?

      He cried to the sun to be no more
      A part of his burning misery.
      He cried to the brooding owl "No more
      Shake down your bony glance, your fingering looks
5     That alter my heart's procession and my blood's course."
      And he cried to the moon, the scolding moon,
      "No more the tripwire of my conscience be
      Threading your silver circuit through eternity;
      Climb down, climb down from your bald perch:
10    Come taste the blood shreds on the ground."

      Deep dew fallen on the secret rose;
      Closed eyes open that cry again.
      Nothing here to bind the heart close;
      No bloom can I cut for the mist of pain.
5     Cushioned grass beneath me, the pine my cloak,
      The wind a whispering skirt;
      The water waits emptily for an empty boat,
      The naked road for a coach as a shirt.
      A little girl is singing
10    In the waiting evening:
      "I ride a grand coach
      With red lacquered sides;
      Without shoe or broach
      My love on a dark horse sighs.
15    "Where are true lovers' hearts
      Bound and wound?
      Beneath the cypress, on West Mound,
      Beneath the brooding ground."
      Cold blue a candle flames,
20    Straining its frail light;
      On the West Mound, rain
      Forced by the wind in the night. 
      Deep dew fallen on the secret rose;
      Closed eyes open that cry again.
25    Nothing here to bind the heart close;
      No bloom can I cut for the mist of pain.

      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
      And less upon his withered back,
15    He ascended the wintry peak
      Sang a rich bar tune and died.
      It was out of pride
      The old man had died.
      He gripped a flute, knew God's great lie,
20    And had a clarity in the eye.
      And at the last, a damned wretched gaiety
      Suffused his frame.
      Mountain echo upon echo
      Hollowed out his fame;
25    Dying, trying once again
      To empty himself of troubles by the score--
      "This joy of death
      Stops the breath."
      In the trees, excited laughter;
30    And after, the silence.

      Jefferson and Washington, and all those famous men
      That out of obscurity came, and were on enlightenment bent
      As on some perfect woman's face, and had such holy measures
       In their drums, out of what dark hole began?
5     Where had all that purposeless glory come?
      O, man's a thief of glory, and steals it from himself.
      Past turbulent lands and frenzied watercourse
      Man finds but broken solitude, finds his own soul hidden there,
      Gasps at his luck, summons all his wayward heart to swear
10    To keep it sacred; and then, lonely with his own audacity,
      Perjures himself in the first company he meets.
      O, man's a thief of glory, and steals it from himself.
      Caravaggio's painted flank that struck God in a horse
      Shimmering, floating there, radiant sky made flesh
15    Above the tumbled saint who crawled in dust away
      And in that abject departure made his prayer.
      What besides his human hand had put it there?
      O, man's a thief of glory, and steals it from himself.

      Stand again at the old well-lip
      As one half-sleeping might
      And drop a stone among those images
      That lay hid in the night.
5     When still a boy at the water's edge
      Cold with terror at the dark,
      The light was like a fish's hide
      That floated back to me.
      And drop a stone among those images
10    That lay hid in the night.
      What has escaped the breath
      In hated words or curses, now rescind
      And let an older beneficence begin;
      Call that harshness in.
15    When driven to that edge of speech
      The tongue half out of the head
      Recall what purpose pleased you best
      When time had not yet begun.
      And drop a stone among those images
20    That lay hid in the night.
      At gasping dawn a boy again
      Swears all breaking light's a game
      And climbs before the mounting sky
      To catch a dreaming fish
25    While the water's high.
      So sound out the plummet-depth
      With some stray rock or cocked ear do it
      Or hearth-stone out of pocket;
      But drop a stone among those images
30    That lay hid in the night.

      The world must change if we but imagine it.
      Copernicus squinting traded in his lamps
      For furious mysteries; Galileo tossed Aristotle out
      For a swinging stone, back to the turbulent sea of thought
5     Because his ghost had no bones. What new paradigm
      Will rinse us shining from the misbegotten foam?
      Unimagined things grow real, grow real.
      Nietzsche knew pale Apollo well, that he
      Must step lightly from red Dionysus' side;
10    Michelangelo's high man and God, that mirrored touch,
      Poured the raging heavens into our daily cup.
      What matter that before unimagined things grow real
      They must first condense in thought? Man's a drunkard
      With his dreams and will piss them to the sod.
15    Unimagined things grow real, grow real.
      Aging wrong and aging right cannot
      Endure our scorn or enhance our thought
      (Morality's an old, old play, with curtains that must fall)
      But new worlds imagined, that body in the breech.
20    Einstein knew that his equation unraveled no new sky
      ---That were indifferent--- but was a chant to change his mind.
      Unimagined things grow real, grow real.

      There, amid the wrong middle of this wood,
      Where God himself must stand and choose
      Or find himself unable, caught between good and good,
      Sweet songs that rise from the geese in the dawn
5     And travel without a quaver in the air
      Until they alight on some rich man's crowded lawn
      Or empty lot abandoned by all but the wind's stir
      Some ancient, contemptuous king or passionate
      Poverty-stricken man cries out his heart
10    And lays his head bare in the miserable dust
      In eternal revelation of his time-bound character
      Before the bawdy wind can close the gate.