Austere this land, and yet it utters flesh:
The longing ache of contact, lids like song
And lips like speech melodious: a mesh
For Don Juans and sanguine passions; strong
This earth of sprinkled blood, the seed of gold,
Whose tainted glitters dazzle young and old!
Jagged umber ridges freaked with lines of snow,
Bitumen lakes, austere as faded fire,
And vague waste lands where gypsies squatting low
Croon winged abandoned musics that expire
Like bruised sweet herbs, gushed madness, agonies
Of lances hurled at pulseless arteries.
Like vapours anchored to a mountain’s thigh
Legioned, remote and abstract, yet withal
Evocative of an infinity—
Beauty becoming metaphysical—
This Phœnix-land breeds new birds in the brain
From ash, for I have never been to Spain.
Trépak
THE trees sprawl up like trumpets in the night,
Great ghosts of once-viridian: but now,
Fibred with brittle tufts of massy snow,
They creak with burdened whiteness, for the bright
Blue-prismed stalactites like wounds of light
Are pendulous from their pagoda-boughs.
And when a wind whirs in among the trees,
As some Silenus fumbling frantic hands
Into a cleft of honey, they cast off
A whittling dust of little hispid stars.
The moon is hungry. Lo! the moon has thinned
To finger-nail’s fine fringe; she is forlorn
With thought of Spring’s flown hollow spells of joy,
When the now-passionless statue of her mind
Was tremulous with passion, nescient lips
Stammered lush ingenuities of love.
Then Summer crackled like a yawn of fire:
The big-lipped consummation of desire.
A starved, lean-ribbed dog with rheumy eyes
Yelps up at her, his poor thin thread of voice
Nigh snaps, and trails its note into a growl,
Then tumbles, frozen stark, amongst the snow.
The barbèd minutes shiver chillily
In wait for something.
Ho! who’s this, a man?
In this torn catafalque of barren boughs?
A patriarchal bearded brittle-bones
Daft, dazed with drink, shuffles his slipshod feet
Scattering sprays of crisply sparkling snow.
Death clanks his rusty mail and flaps his wings
And ogling, draws the man into a dance:
“No more the malady of life unlived
With no grand-opera effects; no more
Heroic sunsets, agonies of rose
To wear you faint; no more the whirlpool’s mist
Of good and evil. It shall be revealed
There is no meaning, no significance
In all this clamour, in this viscous trail
Of sentimental sanatoriums.
Those frowning stoic caryatides,
Who contemplate in decorous solitude
This elegant Golgotha of futile birth,
Are fraudulent mountebanks; unmanicured,
Life’s pointed nails grapple and tear your flanks
Without a murmur trembling from your lips,
O broken vessel sprayed with broken light,
Come to oblivion’s arms; sepulchral night,
Inchoate truth await you—they are kind.
Close your red lashless eyelids. Death is fair....”
The Investiture of a Spinster Hob-Goblin
OH have you heard the chaunt of snails
Tilting upon a big brown leaf,
And held the insect world in fief
And pared the devil’s gilded nails?
And have you parlied with the rose,
And seen the ballet of the bats
And watched the sloths, our acrobats,
Performing at our antic-shows?