318

Walking from the station
The moon was out

And full, at the centre of
A vast corona of cloud.

The light of it fell about
And it caught vividly

In each soft stratum,
As if a great pale plate

Had been broken across
The heavens, and of it

The pieces scattered in
Manifold iterations.

The moon, cradled
In its weave of wreckage,

Moved back at each stride,
And the clouds moved

Further into their pieces,
Distant always as the great

Dome of outer dark beyond,
Growing brighter as the lights

Of the railway faded, and
The lights of the town.

317

Newfoundland, lie still. You are what
I cannot know : there out beyond Nova
Scotia, last bastion of a continent, so
Unshapely and strange, compromising
At no point in my thought, colder and
More distant that the sea itself.

I have seen your clean white houses
In photographs, where they lie before
White giants of ice that drift gently
In a rolling sea. I have seen the bright
Roofs of the quiet and sparse towns,
Torn pools and the masses of fern.

You are not sensible to me, where you
Lie upon the chart. Your body turns
Across the earth's rigid surface, drawn
Up into an angle of the north east : so
Your relation to the continent is forever
Misunderstood, and it had seemed you

Broke from North America's great face.
O, I would arrive at St. John's with thirst
And be fed there and drink my fill.
I would come to the water and look out
On all its great expanse, knowing that
My quiet islands lay out there beyond.

316

It is a calm, cool morning of spring.
No great currents stir the soft air.
From the window's small aperture
Communications rise : the keen,
Accelerating cry of a song sparrow,
The liquid rattle of starlings, low
Moans of doves. Juncos show their
Parallels of white, dropping from
Bush to bush in pairs, each motion
A flash of monochrome and a trill.
Across the yards and thin fences,
Neighbours come sleepily from a
House to pack their car. A saline
Smell on the air, perhaps from the
Tidal river two blocks to the north,
Perhaps from the great grey surface
Of the sound itself. Streams meet
And fasten and merge in the dull
White overhead. From inside the
House, a formless, endless sound
Rises : the warm churn of bathwater.

315

Rabbiner, 1914

His gaze is steady.
Black and white in his beard, and
                                In the cloth
Of his tallit, threads of which trail
Across his lap. Black the kippah
                                At his crown,
Out of which wild hair blows,
                                Pale gossamer,
Manipulated by a shallow breeze.

His hands are bloodless as after
Illness, and in the right a tzitzit
                                Lies limply
Held between ring and little finger.
Its black and white wind endlessly,
                                A trail of stars
Across the darkness of his shawl.

Light plays across his brow, and in
The slight concave
Of the bridge of his fallen nose.
                                He seems to
Watch for a motion in the air.

314

A washing line sways in the breeze,
    Throwing about its worn tassels.

The leafless branches of trees sway
    In sympathetic motion, without

Force, motion with no object, no
    Design : searching as for nothing.

The light of clouds and the light of
    The sun are blent in the ragged

Grass, part held and part refracted
    In windshield and skylight.

The deathliest of noons. Accident
     Does not visit its occasion.

It conceived of no more elaborate
    End than that the cardinals give

Their briefest music from the dark
    Of flowering rhodedendrons.

313

Mont Sainte Victoire, 1886

The valley is a broad expanse of fields,
Here and there lonely barns bask in a
Golden dusk, their shadows lengthening
Across the fallow. The darkness of water
Winds before the ancient walls of a town,
Where blue and purple roofs join their
Diverse surfaces in one undulating wave.
A viaduct runs thinly over an indentation
In the land, seemingly in no relation to it :
A white, insubstantial chain of vertebrae.
Beyond, the holy name rises, blue-grey,
Into a smoky and paling sky, the lines of
Its ridge fallen darkly through it, innocent
Of all trees, waiting for the long darkness
To obscure its broad front. The sky lights
With roselike shapes and dim fluctuations.
Before this all you stand, solitary pine,
Holding your contortions before the world.

312

La chambre bleu, 1901

There is a figure in the rug as of a mother
Tousling the hair of a child. Strewn flowers
Adorn a wall hanging, flowers at the bedside
Crown a cylinder of blue tin. The morning

Rises through its weave of slow surfaces, for
It is not yet light. From the window, a pale
Draught wafts over a striped blanket. Fabric
As only family can imply : sheets, curtains.

Night draws slowly off now. An old shirt
Hangs in the garde-robe, smelling faintly
Of her father : it has faded to a nullness,
Out of slow facility into a poised disuse.

She stands naked in a shallow basin, runs
The water over her body, disfigured gently
As she inclines. She is doubled by the form
Of a girl in a flared skirt, sketched sparsely

On a faded affiche : it adorns the wall as she
Adorns the saddened air. The skirt runs its
Silent carousel about. From a near room rise
The sounds of her parents in their grey sleep.

311

Josef erzählt seine Träume, 1910

In chequered rose and grey,
He is a young harlequin. A night
Shirt as a child would wear.
He closes his eyes, and his heart,

Swallowing his saliva with
A birdlike motion, seeming still
As if he waited for the execution
Of some action over him

That might draw the stars closer,
Or pass him further from himself
Into their meaningless distance.
He is surrounded by his brothers :

Their faces light strangely at his
Words. Yellowed Zähne, cavern
Mouths, lips of withered blossom.
They feed silently upon his dream.

310

Etude d'automne près d'Oberau, 1908

A path of chalk leads down into the mass
Of frail trees. About its curvature, exhausted

Grass lies in pastel green and marigold,
Bleached out of all verdance through days

Of full summer light. A smell rises from it,
Like the stale breath of a horse. Voices sound :

How should we know our death when it comes?
Our bodies falter! Tell then how we should

Know, when he draws our lightnesses from us,
That all has been vouchsafed to his command?

The bodies of the trees are crooked, and white
As ribs. Fires hang, motionless in their force,

At the heavy crowns. Their only expression lies
In the subtle tendance of a momentary draught,

Or in the earth and its soft rumour. Down the
Hillside, a chimney unfolds a stream of smoke.

Mountains fade in the azure, fallen edifices.
They are traced with rivulets like fine veins.

Listen, my hoarse children : the music here is
Of a fast colour, not of your dullish cacophony.

309

Nature morte : l'atelier de l'artiste, 1891

If the knife should lay upon a white tablecloth,
Half turned towards a vase of painted china
In which posed flowers collide, and of which the
Curves show startled faces of daisies, all dulled
In a tangential evening light from the window ;

If the roofs and chimneys should bask in their
Obsolescence as in the last heat of the day,
Raising their perpendiculars to the raw heaven,
Unchanged by the fleet paths of birds that pass
Between the shaded window and their dull clay ;

If the fruit should sit in a glow from the rooftops,
Seeming to swim in uncertain forms, lovely and
Dark as a child's wet hair, in a china fruitbowl
That funnels whitely from the table like a splash
Of spilt cream, pale-skinned, yellow and green ;

Who then shall say this nature is captured where
It lies, or that it is the artifact of crude cohesion?
We parse it out among its very fragrances! Our
Love is no drawn and vivisected thing. Deposons.
We will watch the fruit in their deathless light.

308

Portrait de Mademoiselle Yseult Fayet, 1908

                Her head is heavy yet, for she is a child :
She stoops in the consciousness of her place.
        All sensitivity has moved from her brow into
Her small mouth ; her blonde hair has fallen dully
        About the white shoulders of her blouse ;
        Her grey eyes move before her like water.
        A bow of smudged satin sits at her crown,
Where some vague matriarch will have fastened it,
        As if she were waiting to be photographed.

                She looks upon a bank of rioting flowers
With the consternation of all young girls
                Presented with unfamiliar forms.
        She glances from pendulums of fuchsia
To where dark leaves, seeming spattered in yellow,
Flicker in the evening light :           
                                            Aureoles of seablue
And sky and midnight throb from their stalks,
        Fragile, rich, musked with honey.
The air moves upon her, as a skein of smoke unfolds,
        Versant ses sinuosités dorées.

Pauvre petite! Her love has not yet aged,
    It cowers in its bedclothes at the top of the stairs,
Listening to soft music from the parlour.
Her father's voice. Yseult est réveillée.       She turns.
The plates-bandes resonate with foreign colour.

307

Ophelia, 1905

All dreams hold within a certain scale,
So far as the body will allow. Their prodigies
Spin out upon a dull canvas: forms of brute
Colour that converge behind the palpebra's
Curtain, as forms of oil converge over water.
                             
                            Blue leaves glow like lamps
In the light behind the veil. Raspberries hang,
Succulent and cold in their endowed silence.
Openings of crimson and orange tremble as if
Tired of all their colour. Skeletal irides, lilies
Of insubstantial gold.

Position and motion join fast, breeding lights
Out of their confluence. Ophelia only watches,
Her hair strung with white periwinkles. It is
Her presence calls forth such forms, her fond
Thought that dances upon their surfeit. Hallow,
My dumb child. Make love come forth where
You lay your clouded eyes!

There will be a music to become the moment,
                And a time yet to lay your body down.