Naked white,
Out of her stream.

Wet marble shoulders
Shake star drops on the clouds.

FLOODTIDE

Across the shadows of the surf
The lights of the ship
Twinkle despondently.
The clinging absorbent gray darkness
Sucks them into itself:
Drinks the pale golden tears greedily.

MOUNTAIN PASS IN AUGUST

Night scatters grapes for the harvest.
The moon burns like a leaf.
Along the mountain path
A thin streak of light
Creeps hungrily with its silver belly to the earth.
The old hound laps up the shadows.
Her teats drip the brighter darkness.

CONTEMPORARIES

HARMONICS

YOUNG MEN

Fauns,
Eternal pagans,
Beautiful and obscene,
Leaping through the street
With a flicker of hoofs,
And a flash of tails,

You want dryads
And they give you prostitutes.

YOUNG GIRLS

Your souls are wet flowers,
Bathed in kisses and blood.
Golden Clyties,
The wheel of light
Rushes over your breasts.

HOUSE SPIRITS

Women are flitting around in their shells.
Pale dilutions of the waters of the world
Come through the windows.
Back and forth the women glide in their little waters;
Cellar to garret and garret to cellar,
Winding in and out under door arches and down passages,
They and their spawn,
In the shell,
In the cavern.

You may come in the shell to overpower her,
Males,
But in the shell, in the shell.
She cannot be torn from the shell without dying;
And what is the pleasure of intercourse with the dead?

AT THE MEETING HOUSE

Souls as dry as autumn leaves,
The color long since out.

The organ plays.
The leaves crackle and rustle a little;
Then sink down.

Old ladies with gray moss on their chins,
Old men with camphor and cotton packed around their heads,
Thin child spirits, sharp and shrill as whistles.

Gray old trees;
Gaunt old woods;
Souls as dry as leaves
After autumn is past.

CHRISTIANS

Blind, they storm up from the pit.
You gave them the force,
You, when You poured the measure of agony into them.
Didn't You know what it would be,
Giving blind people fire?
Not gold and red and amber fire,
But marsh fire.
Fire of ice,
Suffering forged into suffering!

They are coming up now.
The sword is uplifted in the hands of the monster.

My valiant little puppets,
Did you think you could stand out against this?
Pierrot and Columbine breeding