Guard yourself from perceiving the inherent nastiness of man and woman.(Expose yourself to it: you might learn something.)Faith, as they now confess, is preposterous, an act of will. Choose the Christian sheep-coteOr the Communist rat-fight: faith will cover your head from the man-devouring stars.
burning-flower from Sparta, the beautiful sea-flowerCut in clear stone, crowned with the fragrant golden mane, shethe ageless, the uncontaminable-This Clytemnestra was her sister, low-statured, fierce-lipped, notdark nor blonde, greenish-gray-eyed,Sinewed with strength, you saw, under the purple folds of thequeen-cloak, but craftier than queenly,Standing between the gilded wooden porch-pillars, great steps ofstone above the steep street,Awaiting…
Someone had given it to my father my eyes at five years oldused to devour it by the hour.I look at a Greek coin, four-drachma piece struck by Lysimachus:young Alexander’s headWith the horns of Ammon and brave brow-ridges, the brightpride and immortal youth and wild sensitiveness.I think of Achilles, Sappho, the Nike. I think of…
Speckle the soil, and the million-berried hedgesTingle with birds at evening, I saw the sombreNovember day redden and go down; a flight of lapwingsWhirled in the hollow of the field, and half-tame pheasantsCried from the trees. I remembered impatientlyHow the long bronze mountain of my own coast,Where color is no account and pathos ridiculous, the…
In a happy hour, or sleep or deathDrowned him deep in dreamy waters,Peace is the ashes of that fire,The heir of that king, the inn of that journey.This last and best and goal: we deadHold it so tight you are envious of usAnd fear under sunk lids contempt.Death-day greetings are the sweetest.Let trumpets roar when…
Forget to hate the cliff, in the upland canyonsWhole hillsides burst aglowWith golden broom. Dear how it rained last month,And every pool was rimmedWith sulphury pollen dust of the wakening pines.Now tall and slender suddenlyThe stalks of purple iris blaze by the brooks,The pencilled ones on the hill;This deerweed shivers with gold, the white globe-tulipsBlow…
Perhaps of my planted forest a fewMay stand yet, dark-leaved Australians or the coastcypress, haggardWith storm-drift; but fire and the axe are devils.Look for foundations of sea-worn granite, my fingershad the artTo make stone love stone, you will find some remnant.But if you should look in your idleness after tenthousand years:It is the granite knoll…
They could not tell where to spread the net,unable to see the phosphorescence of theshoals of fish.They work northward from Monterey, coastingSanta Cruz; off New Year’s Point or offPigeon PointThe look-out man will see some lakes of milk-colorlight on the sea’s night-purple; he points,and the helmsmanTurns the dark prow, the motorboat circles thegleaming shoal and…
Drink deep, drink deep of quietness,And on the margins of the seaRemember not thine old distressNor all the miseries to be.Calmer than mists, and coldAs they, that fold on foldUp the dim valley are rolled,Learn thou to be.The Past—it was a feverish dream,A drunken slumber full of tears.The Future—O what wild wings gleam,Wheeled in the…
Over rock shaped like flame;The old ocean at the land’s foot, the vastGray extension beyond the long white violence;A herd of cows and the bullFar distant, hardly apparent up the dark slope;And the gray air haunted with hawks:This place is the noblest thing I have ever seen.No imaginableHuman presence here could do anythingBut dilute the…
