S1

somewhere i have never travelled,gladly beyond
by E. E. Cummings

somewhere i have never travelled,gladly beyond

any experience,your eyes have their silence:

in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,

or which i cannot touch because they are too near



your slightest look will easily unclose me

though i have closed myself as fingers,

you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens

(touching skilfully,mysteriously)her first rose



or if your wish be to close me, i and

my life will shut very beautifully ,suddenly,

as when the heart of this flower imagines

the snow carefully everywhere descending;

nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals

the power of your intense fragility:whose texture

compels me with the color of its countries,

rendering death and forever with each breathing



(i do not know what it is about you that closes

and opens;only something in me understands

the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)

nobody,not even the rain,has such small hands

Dark Flower

Song of Nature


Mine are the night and morning,

The pits of air, the gulf of space,

The sportive sun, the gibbous moon,

The innumerable days.

I hid in the solar glory,

I am dumb in the pealing song,

I rest on the pitch of the torrent,

In slumber I am strong.

No numbers have counted my tallies,

No tribes my house can fill,

I sit by the shining Fount of Life,

And pour the deluge still;

And ever by delicate powers

Gathering along the centuries

From race on race the rarest flowers,

My wreath shall nothing miss.

And many a thousand summers

My apples ripened well,

And light from meliorating stars

With firmer glory fell.

I wrote the past in characters

Of rock and fire the scroll,

The building in the coral sea,

The planting of the coal.

And thefts from satellites and rings

And broken stars I drew,

And out of spent and aged things

I formed the world anew;

What time the gods kept carnival,

Tricked out in star and flower,

And in cramp elf and saurian forms

They swathed their too much power.

Time and Thought were my surveyors,

They laid their courses well,

They boiled the sea, and baked the layers

Or granite, marl, and shell.

But he, the man-child glorious,--

Where tarries he the while?

The rainbow shines his harbinger,

The sunset gleams his smile.

My boreal lights leap upward,

Forthright my planets roll,

And still the man-child is not born,

The summit of the whole.

Must time and tide forever run?

Will never my winds go sleep in the west?

Will never my wheels which whirl the sun

And satellites have rest?

Too much of donning and doffing,

Too slow the rainbow fades,

I weary of my robe of snow,

My leaves and my cascades;

I tire of globes and races,

Too long the game is played;

What without him is summer's pomp,

Or winter's frozen shade?

I travail in pain for him,

My creatures travail and wait;

His couriers come by squadrons,

He comes not to the gate.

Twice I have moulded an image,

And thrice outstretched my hand,

Made one of day, and one of night,

And one of the salt sea-sand.

One in a Judaean manger,

And one by Avon stream,

One over against the mouths of Nile,

And one in the Academe.

I moulded kings and saviours,

And bards o'er kings to rule;--

But fell the starry influence short,

The cup was never full.

Yet whirl the glowing wheels once more,

And mix the bowl again;

Seethe, fate! the ancient elements,

Heat, cold, wet, dry, and peace, and pain.

Let war and trade and creeds and song

Blend, ripen race on race,

The sunburnt world a man shall breed

Of all the zones, and countless days.

No ray is dimmed, no atom worn,

My oldest force is good as new,

And the fresh rose on yonder thorn

Gives back the bending heavens in dew.

~Ralph Waldo Emerson

Sea

Achilles' Song by Robert Duncan


I do not know more than the Sea tells me,
told me long ago, or I overheard Her
telling distant roar upon the sands,
waves of meaning in the cradle of whose
sounding and resounding power I
slept.

Manchild, She sang

--or was it a storm uplifting the night
into a moving wall in which
I was carried as if a mothering nest had
been made in dread?

the wave of a life darker than my
life before me sped, and I,
larger than I was, grown dark as
the shoreless depth,
arose from myself, shaking the last
light of the sun
from me.

Manchild, She said,

Come back to the shores of what you are.
Come back to the crumbling shores.

All night
The mothering tides in which your
Life first formd in the brooding
light have quencht the bloody
Splendors of the sun

and, under the triumphant processions
of the moon, lay down
thunder upon thunder of an old
longing, the beat

of whose repeated spell
consumes you.

Thetis, then,
my mother, has promised me
the mirage of a boat, a vehicle
of water within the water,
and my soul would return from
the trials of its human state,
from the long siege, from the
struggling companions upon the plain,
from the burning towers and deeds
of honor and dishonor,
the deeper unsatisfied war beneath
and behind the declared war,
and the rubble of beautiful, patiently
workt moonstones, agates, jades, obsidians,

turnd and retrund in the wash of
the tides, the gleaming waste,
the pathetic wonder,

words turnd in the phrases of song
before our song ...or are they

beautiful, patiently workt remembrances of those
long gone from me,
returned anew, ghostly in the light
of the moon, old faces?

For Thetis, my mother, has promised
me a boat,
a lover, an up-lifter of my spirit
into the rage of my first element
rising, a princedom
in the unreal, a share in Death

*

Time, time. It's time.

The business of Troy has long been done.

Achilles in lreuke has come home.

And soon you too will be alone.

--December 10, 1968