White Buildings

As silent as a mirror is believed Realities plunge in silence by....

I am not ready for repentance; Nor to match regrets. For the moth Bends no more than the still Imploring flame. And tremorous In the white falling flakes Kisses are,— The only worth all granting.

It is to be learned— This cleaving and this burning, But only by the one who Spends out himself again.

Twice and twice (Again the smoking souvenir, Bleeding eidolon!) and yet again.

Until the bright logic is won Unwhispering as a mirror Is believed.

Then, drop by caustic drop, a perfect cry Shall string some constant harmony,— Relentless caper for all those who step The legend of their youth into the noon.

There are no stars to-night But those of memory. Yet how much room for memory there is In the loose girdle of soft rain.

There is even room enough For the letters of my mother’s mother, Elizabeth, That have been pressed so long Into a corner of the roof That they are brown and soft, And liable to melt as snow.

Over the greatness of such space Steps must be gentle. It is all hung by an invisible white hair. It trembles as birch limbs webbing the air.

And I ask myself:

“Are your fingers long enough to play Old keys that are but echoes: Is the silence strong enough To carry back the music to its source And back to you again As though to her?”

Yet I would lead my grandmother by the hand Through much of what she would not understand; And so I stumble. And the rain continues on the roof With such a sound of gently pitying laughter.

We make our meek adjustments, Contented with such random consolations As the wind deposits In slithered and too ample pockets.

For we can still love the world, who find A famished kitten on the step, and know Recesses for it from the fury of the street, Or warm torn elbow coverts.

We will sidestep, and to the final smirk Dally the doom of that inevitable thumb That slowly chafes its puckered index toward us, Facing the dull squint with what innocence And what surprise!

And yet these fine collapses are not lies More than the pirouettes of any pliant cane; Our obsequies are, in a way, no enterprise. We can evade you, and all else but the heart: What blame to us if the heart live on.

The game enforces smirks; but we have seen The moon in lonely alleys make A grail of laughter of an empty ash can, And through all sound of gaiety and quest Have heard a kitten in the wilderness.

The willows carried a slow sound, A sarabande the wind mowed on the mead. I could never remember That seething, steady leveling of the marshes Till age had brought me to the sea.

Flags, weeds. And remembrance of steep alcoves Where cypresses shared the noon’s Tyranny; they drew me into hades almost. And mammoth turtles climbing sulphur dreams Yielded, while sun-silt rippled them Asunder....

How much I would have bartered! the black gorge And all the singular nestings in the hills Where beavers learn stitch and tooth. The pond I entered once and quickly fled— I remember now its singing willow rim.

And finally, in that memory all things nurse; After the city that I finally passed With scalding unguents spread and smoking darts The monsoon cut across the delta At gulf gates.... There, beyond the dykes

I heard wind flaking sapphire, like this summer, And willows could not hold more steady sound.

Invariably when wine redeems the sight, Narrowing the mustard scansions of the eyes, A leopard ranging always in the brow Asserts a vision in the slumbering gaze.

Then glozening decanters that reflect the street Wear me in crescents on their bellies. Slow Applause flows into liquid cynosures: —I am conscripted to their shadows’ glow.

Against the imitation onyx wainscoting (Painted emulsion of snow, eggs, yarn, coal, manure) Regard the forceps of the smile that takes her. Percussive sweat is spreading to his hair. Mallets, Her eyes, unmake an instant of the world....

What is it in this heap the serpent pries— Whose skin, facsimile of time, unskeins Octagon, sapphire transepts round the eyes; —From whom some whispered carillon assures Speed to the arrow into feathered skies?

Sharp to the windowpane guile drags a face, And as the alcove of her jealousy recedes An urchin who has left the snow Nudges a cannister across the bar While August meadows somewhere clasp his brow.

Each chamber, transept, coins some squint, Remorseless line, minting their separate wills— Poor streaked bodies wreathing up and out, Unwitting the stigma that each turn repeals: Between black tusks the roses shine!

New thresholds, new anatomies! Wine talons Build freedom up about me and distill This competence—to travel in a tear Sparkling alone, within another’s will.