Marble Faun & Green Bough (6 page)

T
HE
Raven bleak and Philomel
Amid the bleeding trees were fixed.
His hoarse cry and hers were mixed
And through the dark their droppings fell

Upon the red erupted rose,
Upon the broken branch of peach
Blurred with scented mouths, that each
To another sing, and close.

’Mid all the passionate choristers
Of time and tide and love and death,
Philomel with jewelled breath
Dreams of flight, but never stirs.

On rose and peach their droppings bled;
Love a sacrifice has lain,
Beneath his hand his mouth is slain,
Beneath his hand his mouth is dead.

Then the Raven, bleak and blent
With all the slow despair of time,
Lets Philomel about him chime
Until her quiring voice is spent.

Philomel, on pain’s red root
Bloomed and sang, and pain was not;
When she has sung and is forgot,
The Raven speaks, no longer mute.

The Raven bleak and Philomel
Amid the bleeding trees were fixed.
His hoarse cry and hers were mixed,
On rose and peach their droppings fell.

O
VER
the world’s rim, drawing bland November
Reluctant behind them, drawing the moons of cold:
What do their lonely voices wake to remember
In this dust ere ’twas flesh? what restless old

Dream a thousand years was safely sleeping
Wakes my blood to sharp unease? what horn
Rings out to them? Was I free once, sweeping
Their wild and lonely skies ere I was born?

The hand that shaped my body, that gave me vision,
Made me a slave to clay for a fee of breath.
Sweep on, O wild and lonely: mine the derision,
Then the splendor and speed, the cleanness of death.

Over the world’s rim, out of some splendid noon,
Seeking some high desire, and not in vain,
They fill and empty the red and dying moon
And, crying, cross the rim of the world again.

A
S
to an ancient music’s hidden fall
Her seed in the huddled dark was warm and wet
And three cold stars were riven in the wall:
Rain and fire and death above her door were set.

Her hands moaned on her breast in blind and supple fire,
Made light within her cave: she saw her harried
Body wrung to a strange and bitter lyre
Whose music once was pure strings simply married.

One to another in sleepy difference
Her thin and happy sorrows once were wed,
And what tomorrow’s chords are recompense
For yesterday’s single song unravished?

Three stars in her heart when she awakes
As winter’s sleep breaks greening in soft rain,
And in the caverned earth spring’s rumor shakes
As in her loins, the tilled and quickened grain.

G
RAY
the day, and all the year is cold,
Across the empty land the swallows’ cry
Marks the southflown spring. Naught is bowled
Save winter, in the sky.

O sorry earth, when this bleak bitter sleep
Stirs and turns and time once more is green,
In empty path and lane grass will creep
With none to tread it clean.

April and May and June, and all the dearth
Of heart to green it for, to hurt and wake;
What good is budding, gray November earth?
No need to break your sleep for greening’s sake.

The hushed plaint of wind in stricken trees
Shivers the grass in path and lane
And Grief and Time are tideless golden seas—
Hush, hush! He’s home again.

H
E WINNOWED
it with bayonets
And planted it with guns,
And now the final cannonade
Is healed with rains and suns

He looks about—and leaps to stamp
The stubborn grinning seeds
Of olden plantings back beneath
His field of colored weeds.

look, cynthia,
how abelard evaporates
the brow of time, and paris
tastes his bitter thumbs—

the worm grows fat, eviscerate,
but not on love, o cynthia.

D
ID
I know love once? Was it love or grief,
This grave body by where I had lain,
And my heart, a single stubborn leaf
That will not die, though root and branch be slain?

Though warm in dark between the breasts of Death,
That other breast forgot where I did lie,
And from the tree are stripped the leaves of breath,
There’s still one stubborn leaf that will not die

But restless in the sad and bitter earth,
Gains with each dawn a death, with dusk a birth.

T
HE
ship of night, with twilightcolored sails,
Dreamed down the golden river of the west,
And Jesus’ mother mused the sighing gales
While Jesus’ mouth shot drinking on her breast.

Her soft doveslippered eyes strayed in the dusk
Creaming backward from the fallen day,
And a haughty star broke yellow musk
Where dead kings slept the long cold years away.

The hushed voices on the stair of heaven
Upward mounting, wake each drowsing king;
The dawn is milk to swell her breast, her seven
Sorrows crown her with a choiring ring;
A star to fleck young Jesus’ eyes is given,
And white winds in the duskfilled sails to sing.

T
HE
courtesan is dead, for all her subtle ways,
Her bonds are loosed in brittle and bitter leaves;
Her last long backward look’s to see who grieves
The imminent night of her reverted gaze.
Another will reign supreme, now she is dead
And winter’s lean clean rain sweeps out her room,
For man’s delight and anguish: with old new bloom
Crowning his desire, garlanding his head.

Thus the world, turning to cold and death
When swallows empty the blue and drowsy days
And lean rain scatters the ghost of summer’s breath—
The courtesan that’s dead, for all her subtle ways—
Spring will come! rejoice! But still is there
An old sorrow sharp as woodsmoke on the air.

G
USTY
trees windily lean on green
eviscerated skies, the stallion, Wind,
against the sun’s gold collar stamps, to lean
his weight. And once the furrowed day behind,
the golden steed browses the field he breaks
and full of flashing teeth where he has been
trees, the waiting mare his neighing shakes,
hold his heaving shape a moment seen.

Upon the hills, clashing the stars together,
stripping the tree of heaven of its blaze,
stabled, richly grained with golden weather—

within the trees that he has reft and raped
his fierce embrace by riven boughs in shaped,
while on the shaggy hills he stamps and neighs.

T
he race’s splendor lifts her lip, exposes
Amid her scarlet smile her little teeth;
The years are sand the wind plays with; beneath,
The prisoned music of her deathless roses.

Within frostbitten rock she’s fixed and glassed;
Now man may look upon her without fear.
But her contemptuous eyes back through him stare
And shear his fatuous sheep when he has passed.

Lilith she is dead and safely tombed
And man may plant and prune with naught to bruit
His heired and ancient lot to which he’s doomed,
For quiet drowse the flocks when wolf is mute—
Ay, Lilith she is dead, and she is wombed,
And breaks his vine, and slowly eats the fruit.

L
IPS
that of thy weary all seem weariest,
And wearier for the curled and pallid sly
Still riddle of thy secret face, and thy
Sick despair of its own ill obsessed;
Lay no hand to heart, do not protest
That smiling leaves thy tired mouth reconciled,
For swearing so keeps thee but ill beguiled
With secret joy of thine own flank and breast.

Weary thy mouth with smiling: canst thou bride
Thyself with thee, or thine own kissing slake?
Thy belly’s waking doth itself deride
With sleep’s sharp absence, coming so awake;
And near thy mouth thy twinned heart’s grief doth hide
For there’s no breast between: it cannot break.

L
IKE
to the tree that, young, reluctant yet
While sap’s but troubled rumor of green spring;
Like to the leaf that in warm bud does cling
In maidened sleep unreft though passionate;
Or like the cloud that, quicked and shaped for rain
But flees it in a silver hot despair;
The bird that dreams of flight and does not dare,
The sower who fears to sow and reaps no grain.

Beauty or gold or scarlet, then long sleep:
All this does buy brave trafficking with breath,
That though gray cuckold Time be horned by Death,
Then Death in turn is cuckold, unawake.
But sown cold years the stolen bread you reap
By all the Eves unsistered since the Snake.

L
ADY
, unawares still bride of sleep,
To thine own self sweet prisoner and fell
Thrall to the vassalled garrison that keep
Thy soft unguarded breast’s white citadel;

Alas, oft-cozened maid, who’d not be twain
Yet self-confounded, while importunates
The foe repulsed, and single, dost remain
The frequent darling of the gods and fates.

Thou chaste? Why, I’ve lain lonely nights that fled
No swifter than thou came and brided me
Who held thee as the fabric of thy bed
Where, turning on thy pillow’s cheek, thy kiss
Took in thy citadel an enemy
Against whose mouth thy mouth sleeps on—like this.

H
ER
unripe shallow breast is green among
The windy bloom of drunken apple trees,
And seven fauns importunate as bees
To sip the thin young honey of her tongue.
The old satyr, leafed and hidden, dreams her kiss
His beard amid, leaving his mouth in sight;
Dreams her body in a moony night
Shortening and shuddering into his;

Then sees a faun, bolder than the rest,
Slide his hand upon her sudden breast,
And feels the life in him go cold, and pass
Until the fire that kiss had brought to be
Gutters and faints away; ’tis night, and he
Laughing wrings the bitter wanton grass.

B
ENEATH
the apple tree Eve’s tortured shape
Glittered in the Snake’s, her riven breast
Sloped his coils and took the sun’s escape
To augur black her sin from east to west.
In winter’s night man may keep him warm
Regretting olden sins he did omit;
With fetiches the whip of blood to charm,
Forgetting that with breath he’s heir to it.

But old gods fall away, the ancient Snake
Is throned and crowned instead, and has for minion
That golden apple which will never slake
But ever feeds man’s crumb of fire, when plover
And swallow and shrill northing birds whip over
Nazarene and Roman and Virginian.

lets see I’ll say—between two brief balloons
of skirts I saw grave chalices of knees
and momently the cloyed and cloudy bees
where hive her honeyed thighs those little moons

these slender moons’ unsunder I would break
so soft I’d break that hushed virginity
of sleep that in her narrow house would she
find me drowsing when she came awake—

no—madam I love your daughter—I will say

from out some leafed dilemma of desire
the wind hales yawning spring still half undressed
the hand that once did short to sighs her breast
now slaps her white behind to rosy fire

—sir your health your money how are they—

I
F THERE
be grief, then let it be but rain,
And this but silver grief for grieving’s sake,
If these green woods be dreaming here to wake
Within my heart, if I should rouse again.

But I shall sleep, for where is any death
While in these blue hills slumbrous overhead
I’m rooted like a tree? Though I be dead,
This earth that holds me fast will find me breath.