The Double Dream of Spring Read Online Free PDF Page A

moved on
    To other lands, other suns, to say all there is time for
    Because time is just what this instant is?
    Even at the beginning the manner of the hourglass
    Was all-severing, weaning of that delicious thread
    That comes down even to us, “Bénédiction de Dieu dans la Solitude”
    Sand shaper, whistler of affectionate destinies, flames and fruit.
    And now you are this thing that is outside me,
    And how I in token of it am like you is
    In place. In between are the bits of information
    That circulate around you, all that ancient stuff,
    Brought here, reassembled, carted off again
    Into the back yard of your dream. If we are closer
    To anything, it is in this sense that doesn’t count,
    Like the last few blank pages of a book.
    This is why I look at you
    With the eyes you once liked so much in animals:
    When, in that sense, is it to be?
    An ultimate warm day of the year
    With the light unapproachable on the beaches?
    In which case you return to the fork in the road
    Doubtless to take the same path again? The second-time knowledge
    Gives it fluency, makes it less of a choice
    As you are older and in a dream touch bottom.
    The laburnum darkened, denser at the deserted lake;
    Mountain ash mindlessly dropping berries: to whom is all this?
    I tell you, we are being called back
    For having forgotten these names
    For forgetting our proper names, for falling like nameless things
    On unfamiliar slopes. To be seen again, churlishly into life,
    Returning, as to the scene of a crime.
    That is how the singer spoke,
    In vague terms, but with an eternity of thirst
    To end with a small tumbler of water
    Or a single pink, leaning against the window frame in the bubble evening,
    The mind of our birth. It was all sad and real.
    They slept together at the commercial school.
    The binding of a book made a tall V, like undone hair,
    “To say all there was never time for.”
    It is no triumph to point out
    That no accounting was ever asked.
    The land lies flat under the umbrella
    Of anxiety perpetually smoothed over
    As though some token were required of how each
    Arrived early for the appointment in different cities.
    The least suspicion would have crumbled,
    Positive, but in the end you were right to
    Pillage and obstruct. And she
    Stared at her toes. The argument
    Can be brought back intact to the point
    Of summarizing how it’s just a cheap way
    Of letting you off, and finally
    How blue objects protruded out of the
    Potential, dying and recoiling, returning as you meet them
    Touching forever, water lifted out of the sea.

Years of Indiscretion
    Whatever your eye alights on this morning is yours:
    Dotted rhythms of colors as they fade to the color,
    A gray agate, translucent and firm, with nothing
    Beyond its purifying reach. It’s all there.
    These are things offered to your participation.
    These pebbles in a row are the seasons.
    This is a house in which you may wish to live.
    There are more than any of us to choose from
    But each must live its own time.
    And with the urging of the year each hastens onward separately
    In strange sensations of emptiness, anguish, romantic
    Outbursts, visions and wraiths. One meeting
    Cancels another. “The seven-league boot
    Gliding hither and thither of its own accord”
    Salutes these forms for what they now are:
    Fables that time invents
    To explain its passing. They entertain
    The very young and the very old, and not
    One’s standing up in them to shoulder
    Task and vision, vision in the form of a task
    So that the present seems like yesterday
    And yesterday the place where we left off a little while ago.

Farm Implements and Rutabagas in a Landscape
    The first of the undecoded messages read: “Popeye sits in thunder,
    Unthought of. From that shoebox of an apartment,
    From livid curtain’s hue, a tangram emerges: a country.”
    Meanwhile the Sea Hag was relaxing on a green couch: “How pleasant
    To spend one’s vacation en la casa de Popeye,” she scratched
    Her cleft chin’s solitary hair.