After awhile, I wandered
off down empty corridors
in search of a toilet.
Dream, Paterson, Fall 1948
A Mad Gleam
Go back to Egypt and the Greeks,
Where the Wizard understood
The spectre haunted where man seeks
And spoke to ghosts that stood in blood.
Go back, go back to the old legend;
The soul remembers, and is true:
What has been most and least imagined,
No other, there is nothing new.
The giant Phantom is ascending
Toward its coronation, gowned
With music unheard, but unending:
Follow the flower to the ground.
New York, January 1949
Complaint of the Skeleton to Time
Take my love, it is not true,
So let it tempt no body new;
Take my lady, she will sigh
For my bed where’er I lie;
Take them, said the skeleton,
But leave my bones alone.
Take my raiment, now grown cold,
To give to some poor poet old;
Take the skin that hoods this truth
If his age would wear my youth;
Take them, said the skeleton,
But leave my bones alone.
Take the thoughts that like the wind
Blow my body out of mind;
Take this heart to go with that
And pass it on from rat to rat;
Take them, said the skeleton,
But leave my bones alone.
Take the art which I bemoan
In a poem’s crazy tone;
Grind me down, though I may groan,
To the starkest stick and stone;
Take them, said the skeleton,
But leave my bones alone.
Early 1949
Psalm I
These psalms are the workings of the vision haunted mind and not that reason which never changes.
I am flesh and blood, but my mind is the focus of much lightning.
I change with the weather, with the state of my finances, with the work I do, with my company.
But truly none of these is accountable for the majestic flaws of mind which have left my brain open to hallucination.
All work has been an imitation of the literary cackle in my head.
This gossip is an eccentric document to be lost in a library and rediscovered when the Dove descends.
New York, February 1949
An Eastern Ballad
I speak of love that comes to mind:
The moon is faithful, although blind;
She moves in thought she cannot speak.
Perfect care has made her bleak.
I never dreamed the sea so deep,
The earth so dark; so long my sleep,
I have become another child.
I wake to see the world go wild.
1945–1949
Sweet Levinsky
Sweet Levinsky in the night
Sweet Levinsky in the light
do you giggle out of spite,
or are you laughing in delight
sweet Levinsky, sweet Levinsky?
Sweet Levinsky, do you tremble
when the cock crows, and dissemble
as you amble to the gambol?
Why so humble when you stumble
sweet Levinsky, sweet Levinsky?
Sweet Levinsky, why so tearful,
sweet Levinsky don’t be fearful,
sweet Levinsky here’s your earful
of the angels chirping cheerfully
Levinsky, sweet Levinsky,
sweet Levinsky, sweet Levinsky.
New York, Spring 1949
Psalm II
Ah, still Lord, ah, sweet Divinity
Incarnate in our grave and holy substance,
Circumscribed in this hexed endless world
Of Time, that turns a triple face, from Hell,
Imprisoned joy’s incognizable thought,
To mounted earth, that shudders to conceive,
Toward angels, borne unseen out of this world,
Translate the speechless stanzas of the rose
Into my poem, and I vow to copy
Every petal on a page; perfume
My mind, ungardened, and in weedy earth;
Let these dark leaves be lit with images
That strike like lightning from eternal mind,
Truths that are not visible in any light
That changes and is Time, like flesh or theory,
Corruptible like any clock of meat
That sickens and runs down to die
With all those structures and machinery
Whose bones and bridges break and wash to sea
And are dissolved into green salt and coral.
A Bird of Paradise, the Nightingale
I cried for not so long ago, the poet’s
Phoenix, and the erotic Swan
Which descended and transfigured Time,
And all but destroyed it, in the Dove
I speak of now are here, I saw it here,
The Miracle, which no man knows entire,
Nor I myself. But shadow is my prophet,
I cast a shadow that surpasses me,
And I write, shadow changes into bone,
To say that still Word, the prophetic image
Beyond our present strength of flesh to bear,
