And Daughters with Curls

Portentous enunciation, syllable To blessed syllable affined, and sound Bubbling felicity in cantilene, Prolific and tormenting tenderness Of music, as it comes to unison, Forgather and bell boldly Crispin’s last Deduction. Thrum with a proud douceur His grand pronunciamento and devise.

The chits came for his jigging, bluet-eyed, Hands without touch yet touching poignantly, Leaving no room upon his cloudy knee, Prophetic joint, for its diviner young. The return to social nature, once begun, Anabasis or slump, ascent or chute, Involved him in midwifery so dense His cabin counted as philactary, Then place of vexing palankeens, then haunt Of children nibbling at the sugared void, Infants yet eminently old, then dome And halidom for the unbraided femes, Green crammers of the green fruits of the world, Bidders and biders for its ecstasies, True daughters both of Crispin and his clay. All this with many mulctings of the man, Effective colonizer sharply stopped In the door-yard by his own capacious bloom. But that this bloom grown riper, showing nibs Of its eventual roundness, puerile tints Of spiced and weathery rouges, should complex The stopper to indulgent fatalist Was unforeseen. First Crispin smiled upon His goldenest demoiselle, inhabitant, She seemed, of a country of the capuchins, So delicately blushed, so humbly eyed, Attentive to a coronal of things Secret and singular. Second, upon A second similar counterpart, a maid Most sisterly to the first, not yet awake Excepting to the motherly footstep, but Marvelling sometimes at the shaken sleep. Then third, a thing still flaxen in the light, A creeper under jaunty leaves. And fourth, Mere blusteriness that gewgaws jollified, All din and gobble, blasphemously pink. A few years more and the vermeil capuchin Gave to the cabin, lordlier than it was, The dulcet omen fit for such a house. The second sister dallying was shy To fetch the one full-pinioned one himself Out of her botches, hot embosomer. The third one gaping at the orioles Lettered herself demurely as became A pearly poetess, peaked for rhapsody. The fourth, pent now, a digit curious. Four daughters in a world too intricate In the beginning, four blithe instruments Of differing struts, four voices several In couch, four more personæ, intimate As buffo, yet divers, four mirrors blue That should be silver, four accustomed seeds Hinting incredible hues, four self-same lights That spread chromatics in hilarious dark, Four questioners and four sure answerers.

Crispin concocted doctrine from the rout. The world, a turnip once so readily plucked, Sacked up and carried overseas, daubed out Of its ancient purple, pruned to the fertile main, And sown again by the stiffest realist, Came reproduced in purple, family font, The same insoluble lump. The fatalist Stepped in and dropped the chuckling down his craw, Without grace or grumble. Score this anecdote Invented for its pith, not doctrinal In form though in design, as Crispin willed, Disguised pronunciamento, summary, Autumn’s compendium, strident in itself But muted, mused, and perfectly revolved In those portentous accents, syllables, And sounds of music coming to accord Upon his law, like their inherent sphere, Seraphic proclamations of the pure Delivered with a deluging onwardness. Or if the music sticks, if the anecdote Is false, if Crispin is a profitless Philosopher, beginning with green brag, Concluding fadedly, if as a man Prone to distemper he abates in taste, Fickle and fumbling, variable, obscure, Glozing his life with after-shining flicks, Illuminating, from a fancy gorged By apparition, plain and common things, Sequestering the fluster from the year, Making gulped potions from obstreperous drops, And so distorting, proving what he proves Is nothing, what can all this matter since The relation comes, benignly, to its end?

So may the relation of each man be clipped.

From the Misery of Don Joost

I have finished my combat with the sun; And my body, the old animal, Knows nothing more.

The powerful seasons bred and killed, And were themselves the genii Of their own ends.

Oh, but the very self of the storm Of sun and slaves, breeding and death, The old animal,

The senses and feeling, the very sound And sight, and all there was of the storm, Knows nothing more.

O, Florida, Venereal Soil

A few things for themselves, Convolvulus and coral, Buzzards and live-moss, Tiestas from the keys, A few things for themselves, Florida, venereal soil, Disclose to the lover.

The dreadful sundry of this world, The Cuban, Polodowsky, The Mexican women, The negro undertaker Killing the time between corpses Fishing for crayfish ... Virgin of boorish births,

Swiftly in the nights, In the porches of Key West, Behind the bougainvilleas, After the guitar is asleep, Lasciviously as the wind, You come tormenting, Insatiable,

When you might sit, A scholar of darkness, Sequestered over the sea, Wearing a clear tiara Of red and blue and red, Sparkling, solitary, still, In the high sea-shadow.

Donna, donna, dark, Stooping in indigo gown And cloudy constellations, Conceal yourself or disclose Fewest things to the lover-- A hand that bears a thick-leaved fruit, A pungent bloom against your shade.

Last Looks at the Lilacs

To what good, in the alleys of the lilacs, O caliper, do you scratch your buttocks And tell the divine ingénue, your companion, That this bloom is the bloom of soap And this fragrance the fragrance of vegetal?

Do you suppose that she cares a tick, In this hymeneal air, what it is That marries her innocence thus, So that her nakedness is near, Or that she will pause at scurrilous words?

Poor buffo! Look at the lavender And look your last and look still steadily, And say how it comes that you see Nothing but trash and that you no longer feel Her body quivering in the Floréal

Toward the cool night and its fantastic star, Prime paramour and belted paragon, Well-booted, rugged, arrogantly male, Patron and imager of the gold Don John, Who will embrace her before summer comes.

The Worms at Heaven’s Gate

Out of the tomb, we bring Badroulbadour, Within our bellies, we her chariot. Here is an eye. And here are, one by one, The lashes of that eye and its white lid. Here is the cheek on which that lid declined, And, finger after finger, here, the hand, The genius of that cheek. Here are the lips, The bundle of the body and the feet.

* * * * *

Out of the tomb we bring Badroulbadour.

The Jack-Rabbit

In the morning, The jack-rabbit sang to the Arkansaw. He carolled in caracoles On the feat sandbars.

The black man said, “Now, grandmother, Crochet me this buzzard On your winding-sheet, And do not forget his wry neck After the winter.”

The black man said, “Look out, O caroller, The entrails of the buzzard Are rattling.”

Valley Candle

My candle burned alone in an immense valley. Beams of the huge night converged upon it, Until the wind blew. Then beams of the huge night Converged upon its image, Until the wind blew.

Anecdote of Men by the Thousand

The soul, he said, is composed Of the external world.

There are men of the East, he said, Who are the East. There are men of a province Who are that province There are men of a valley Who are that valley.

There are men whose words Are as natural sounds Of their places As the cackle of toucans In the place of toucans.

The mandoline is the instrument Of a place.

Are there mandolines of western mountains? Are there mandolines of northern moonlight?

The dress of a woman of Lhassa, In its place, Is an invisible element of that place Made visible.

The Silver Plough-Boy

A black figure dances in a black field. It seizes a sheet, from the ground, from a bush, as if spread there by some wash-woman for the night. It wraps the sheet around its body, until the black figure is silver. It dances down a furrow, in the early light, back of a crazy plough, the green blades following. How soon the silver fades in the dust! How soon the black figure slips from the wrinkled sheet! How softly the sheet falls to the ground!

The Apostrophe to Vincentine