THIS Water, like a sky that no one uses,

Cloaked in dark furs, with faces grave and sweet,And white as air. None knew them, they were strangers—Princes gone feasting, barons with gipsy eyesAnd names that rang like viols—perchance, who knows,Kings of old Tartary, forgotten, swept from Asia,Blown on raven chargers across the world,For ever smiling sadly in their beardsAnd stamping abruptly into courtyards at…

Who, not content with Heavenly stenches,Insist on taking up the drains,For you I’ve only two suggestions,Who prowl with torches in this Bog—Small good you’ll get from asking questions;Walk on your nostrils, like a dog.

Death’s candy-bed. Stone caked on stone,Dry pyramids and racks of iron balls.Life is observed, a precipitate of pellets,Or grammarians freeze it into spar,Their rhomboids, as for instance, the finest crystalFixing a snowfall under glass. Gods are laid outIn alabaster, with horny cartilageAnd zinc ribs; or systems of ecstasyBaked into bricks. There is a gallery of…

Sometimes she is the colour of lions, of sand in the fire of noon,Sometimes as bruised with shadows as the afternoon.Sometimes she moves like rivers, sometimes like trees;Or tranced and fixed like South Pole silences;Sometimes she is beauty, sometimes fury, sometimes neither,Sometimes nothing, drained of meaning, null as water.Sometimes, when she makes pea-soup or plays…

Stem the dark tides, take by the throat strange galesAnd toss their spume to stars unknown, as kingsRain diamonds to the mob . . . then arch my sailsBy waterspouts of lace and bubbling ringsGulfed in deep satin, conquer those warmer wavesWhere none but mermaids ride, and the still cavesUntrod by sailors . . ….

You’re perfectly impossible to comprehend,I’m such a busy man.Good God, haven’t you got a circumference?There’s not a moment I can call my own—My clocks, my keys, my wheels and instrumentsAnd that fierce Ethiop, the telephone.No doubt, it’s very charming out in the sun,But there are other things, you know. In any case,I’ve got no time,…