And what I knew you felt Came then. Monotonous earth I saw become Illimitable spheres of you, And that white animal, so lean, Turned Vincentine, Turned heavenly Vincentine, And that white animal, so lean, Turned heavenly, heavenly Vincentine.

Floral Decorations for Bananas

Well, nuncle, this plainly won’t do. These insolent, linear peels And sullen, hurricane shapes Won’t do with your eglantine. They require something serpentine. Blunt yellow in such a room!

You should have had plums tonight, In an eighteenth-century dish, And pettifogging buds, For the women of primrose and purl, Each one in her decent curl. Good God! What a precious light!

But bananas hacked and hunched ... The table was set by an ogre, His eye on an outdoor gloom And a stiff and noxious place. Pile the bananas on planks. The women will be all shanks And bangles and slatted eyes.

And deck the bananas in leaves Plucked from the Carib trees, Fibrous and dangling down, Oozing cantankerous gum Out of their purple maws, Darting out of their purple craws Their musky and tingling tongues.

Anecdote of Canna

Huge are the canna in the dreams of X, the mighty thought, the mighty man. They fill the terrace of his capitol.

His thought sleeps not. Yet thought that wakes In sleep may never meet another thought Or thing.... Now day-break comes....

X promenades the dewy stones, Observes the canna with a clinging eye, Observes and then continues to observe.

Of the Manner of Addressing Clouds

Gloomy grammarians in golden gowns, Meekly you keep the mortal rendezvous, Eliciting the still sustaining pomps Of speech which are like music so profound They seem an exaltation without sound. Funest philosophers and ponderers, Their evocations are the speech of clouds. So speech of your processionals returns In the casual evocations of your tread Across the stale, mysterious seasons. These Are the music of meet resignation; these The responsive, still sustaining pomps for you To magnify, if in that drifting waste You are to be accompanied by more Than mute bare splendors of the sun and moon.

Of Heaven Considered as a Tomb

What word have you, interpreters, of men Who in the tomb of heaven walk by night, The darkened ghosts of our old comedy? Do they believe they range the gusty cold, With lanterns borne aloft to light the way, Freemen of death, about and still about To find whatever it is they seek? Or does That burial, pillared up each day as porte And spiritous passage into nothingness, Foretell each night the one abysmal night, When the host shall no more wander, nor the light Of the steadfast lanterns creep across the dark? Make hue among the dark comedians, Halloo them in the topmost distances For answer from their icy Elysée.

Of the Surface of Things