Rationalists, wearing square hats, Think, in square rooms, Looking at the floor, Looking at the ceiling. They confine themselves To right-angled triangles. If they tried rhomboids, Cones, waving lines, ellipses-- As for example, the ellipse of the half-moon-- Rationalists would wear sombreros.

Bantams in Pine-Woods

Chieftain Iffucan of Azcan in caftan Of tan with henna hackles, halt!

Damned universal cock, as if the sun Was blackamoor to bear your blazing tail.

Fat! Fat! Fat! Fat! I am the personal. Your world is you. I am my world.

You ten-foot poet among inchlings. Fat! Begone! An inchling bristles in these pines,

Bristles, and points their Appalachian tangs, And fears not portly Azcan nor his hoos.

Anecdote of the Jar

I placed a jar in Tennessee, And round it was, upon a hill. It made the slovenly wilderness Surround that hill.

The wilderness rose up to it, And sprawled around, no longer wild. The jar was round upon the ground And tall and of a port in air.

It took dominion everywhere. The jar was gray and bare. It did not give of bird or bush, Like nothing else in Tennessee.

Palace of the Babies

The disbeliever walked the moonlit place, Outside of gates of hammered serafin, Observing the moon-blotches on the walls.

The yellow rocked across the still façades, Or else sat spinning on the pinnacles, While he imagined humming sounds and sleep.

The walker in the moonlight walked alone, And each blank window of the building balked His loneliness and what was in his mind:

If in a shimmering room the babies came, Drawn close by dreams of fledgling wing, It was because night nursed them in its fold.

Night nursed not him in whose dark mind The clambering wings of birds of black revolved, Making harsh torment of the solitude.

The walker in the moonlight walked alone, And in his heart his disbelief lay cold. His broad-brimmed hat came close upon his eyes.

Frogs Eat Butterflies. Snakes Eat Frogs. Hogs Eat Snakes. Men Eat Hogs

It is true that the rivers went nosing like swine, Tugging at banks, until they seemed Bland belly-sounds in somnolent troughs,

That the air was heavy with the breath of these swine, The breath of turgid summer, and Heavy with thunder’s rattapallax,

That the man who erected this cabin, planted This field, and tended it awhile, Knew not the quirks of imagery,

That the hours of his indolent, arid days, Grotesque with this nosing in banks, This somnolence and rattapallax,

Seemed to suckle themselves on his arid being, As the swine-like rivers suckled themselves While they went seaward to the sea-mouths.

Jasmine’s Beautiful Thoughts Underneath the Willow

My titillations have no foot-notes And their memorials are the phrases Of idiosyncratic music.

The love that will not be transported In an old, frizzled, flambeaued manner, But muses on its eccentricity,

Is like a vivid apprehension Of bliss beyond the mutes of plaster, Or paper souvenirs of rapture,

Of bliss submerged beneath appearance, In an interior ocean’s rocking Of long, capricious fugues and chorals.

Cortège for Rosenbloom

Now, the wry Rosenbloom is dead And his finical carriers tread, On a hundred legs, the tread Of the dead. Rosenbloom is dead.

They carry the wizened one Of the color of horn To the sullen hill, Treading a tread In unison for the dead.

Rosenbloom is dead. The tread of the carriers does not halt On the hill, but turns Up the sky. They are bearing his body into the sky.

It is the infants of misanthropes And the infants of nothingness That tread The wooden ascents Of the ascending of the dead.

It is turbans they wear And boots of fur As they tread the boards In a region of frost, Viewing the frost.

To a chirr of gongs And a chitter of cries And the heavy thrum Of the endless tread That they tread.

To a jangle of doom And a jumble of words Of the intense poem Of the strictest prose Of Rosenbloom.

And they bury him there, Body and soul, In a place in the sky. The lamentable tread! Rosenbloom is dead.

Tattoo

The light is like a spider. It crawls over the water. It crawls over the edges of the snow. It crawls under your eyelids And spreads its webs there-- Its two webs.

The webs of your eyes Are fastened To the flesh and bones of you As to rafters or grass.

There are filaments of your eyes On the surface of the water And in the edges of the snow.

The Bird with the Coppery, Keen Claws

Above the forest of the parakeets, A parakeet of parakeets prevails, A pip of life amid a mort of tails.

(The rudiments of tropics are around, Aloe of ivory, pear of rusty rind.) His lids are white because his eyes are blind.

He is not paradise of parakeets, Of his gold ether, golden alguazil. Except because he broods there and is still,

Panache upon panache, his tails deploy Upward and outward, in green-vented forms, His tip a drop of water full of storms.

But though the turbulent tinges undulate As his pure intellect applies its laws, He moves not on his coppery, keen claws.

He munches a dry shell while he exerts His will, yet never ceases, perfect cock, To flare, in the sun-pallor of his rock.

Life Is Motion

In Oklahoma, Bonnie and Josie, Dressed in calico, Danced around a stump. They cried, “Ohoyaho, Ohoo” ... Celebrating the marriage Of flesh and air.

Architecture