Collected Poems Read Online Free PDF Page B

wrong.
    Summer, the rain, oh Lord, the rain
    hammers us into a joy,
    which we call divinity.
    And we are mistaken.
    The heart’s weather of nipple and music
    condenses only on the soft metal of personal knowledge.
    Our presence is the savor.
    We must get to the iron valve in the center
    of that meaningless leafage.
    Going past even the statuary and the unnaturalness
    our faith is founded on.
    To close it down.
    To reduce that earthquake of flux.
    Reducing it to human use.
TRANSLATION INTO THE ORIGINAL
    Apollo walks the deep roads back in the hills
    through sleet to the warm place she is.
    Eats her fine cunt and afterward they pretend
    to watch the late movie to cover their happiness.
    He swims with his body in the empty Tyrrhenian Sea.
    Comes out of that summer purple with his mind.
    Cherishes and makes all year in the city.
    But Apollo is not reasonable about desire.
    This wolf god, rust god, lord of the countryside.
    God of dance and lover of mortal women. Homer said he
    is fierce. His coming like the swift coming of night.
    That the gods feel fear and awe in the presence
    of this lawgiver, explainer of the rules of death.
    Averter of evil and praiser of the best.
    The violent indifference of Dionysus makes nothing
    live. Awful Apollo stands in the brilliant fields,
    watching the wind change the olive trees.
    He comes back through the dark singing
    so quietly that you can hear nothing.
BURNING AND FATHERING: ACCOUNTS OF MY COUNTRY
    The classical engine of death moves my day. Hurrying me.
    Harrowing. Tempering everything piece by piece
    in a mighty love of perfection, and leaving each part
    broken in turn. I walk through the energy of this slum,
    walking there by the Loire among the châteaux of my country.
    “Banquets where beautiful and virtuous ladies walked
    half-naked, with their hair loose like brides.” Or François
    Premier blossoming in that first spring of France.
                                            Flickering.
    As Diane de Poitiers flickers. As the ladies of Watteau flicker.
    As these fine houses blur to tenements. Beyond, in the park,
    the great eucalyptus are clearly provisional, waning in time.
    And there are gods in the palace of leaves, their faint glaze
    showing briefly as they promenade in the high air, going away.
    François Premier dimming. The trees shuddering. The gods,
    the Loire, flickering at night. My country, which does not exist,
    failing. I walk here singing there by the river with all times
    and places flickering and singing about me in their dialects
    as I go back into the slum dreaming of Helen washing her breasts
    in the Turkish morning.
                             But she wavers and cracks. Suddenly
    the towers go down everywhere. Everything is breaking.
    Everything is lost in the fire and lost in the gauging. Fire
    burning inside of fire, where love celebrates but cannot preserve.
    The marble heart of the world fractures. The unrelenting engine
    tests everything with a steel exigence, and returns it maimed.
    And yet all we have is somehow born in that murdering.
    Born in the fire and born in the breaking. Something is perfected.
    François Premier changes as he watches the dying Leonardo drag
    through the splendid corridors. Pressure of that terrible intolerance
    gets brandy in the welter. Such honey of that heavy rider.
THE FASHIONABLE HEART
    The Chinese, to whom the eighteenth-century English
    sent for their elaborate sets of dishes,
    followed the accompanying designs faithfully:
    writing red in the spaces where it said red,
    yellow where it said yellow.
BREAKFAST
    It was a fine Leghorn egg,
    and inside, unexpectedly, was the city
    of Byzantium. Even from that height
    he could see the flash of bedding
    at the windows, the lump of Hagia Sophia,
    and blue flags on the enormous city walls.
    Clearly it was midsummer. Right,
    he thought, remembering about love.
    Not wanting the responsibility.
    Watching the flies begin at