Not less because in purple I descended The western day through what you called the loneliest air, Not less was I myself. What was the ointment sprinkled in my beard? What were the hymns that buzzed around my ears? What was the sea whose tide flowed through me there? From my own mind that golden ointment rained And my ears made the blowing hymns...Learn More

At the earliest ending of winter, In March, a scrawny cry from outside Seemed like a sound in his mind. He knew that he heard it, A bird's cry, at daylight or before, In the early March wind. The sun was rising at six, No longer a battered panache above snow... It would have been outside. It was not from the vast ventriloquism Of sleep's faded...Learn More

That strange flower, the sun, Is just what you say. Have it your way. The world is ugly, And the people are sad. That tuft of jungle feathers, That animal eye, Is just what you say. That savage of fire, That seed, Have it your way. The world is ugly, And the people are sad....Learn More

How mad would he have to be to say, “He beheld An order and thereafter he belonged To it”? He beheld the order of the northern sky. But the beggar gazes on calamity And thereafter he belongs to it, to bread Hard found, and water tasting of misery. For him cold’s glacial beauty is his fate. Without understanding, he belongs to it And the night,...Learn More

Call the roller of big cigars, The muscular one, and bid him whip In kitchen cups concupiscent curds. Let the wenches dawdle in such dress As they are used to wear, and let the boys Bring flowers in last month's newspapers. Let be be finale of seem. The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream. Take from the dresser of deal, Lacking the three...Learn More

Day creeps down. The moon is creeping up. The sun is a corbeil of flowers the moon Blanche Places there, a bouquet. Ho-ho…The dump is full Of images. Days pass like papers from a press. The bouquets come here in the papers. So the sun, And so the moon, both come, and the janitor's poems Of every day, the wrapper on the can of pears, The cat in the...Learn More