While flower to flower gives up the high seed
and rock keeps its flower sown
in a beaten coat of diamond and sand,
man crumples the peal of light he picks
in the deep-set springs of the sea
and drills the pulsing metal in his hands.
And soon, among clothes and smoke, on the broken table,
like a shuffled pack, there sits the soul:
quartz and sleeplessness, tears in the ocean
like pools of cold: yet still
man kills and tortures it with paper and with hate,
stuffs it each day under rugs, rends it
on the hostile trappings of the wire.
No: in corridors, air, sea, or roads,
who (like crimson poppy) keeps
no dagger to guard his blood? Anger has drained
the tradesman’s dreary trafficking in lives,
while in the height of the plum tree the dew
leaves its clear mark a thousand years
on the same waiting branch, oh heart, oh face ground down
among deep pits in autumn.
How many times in the city’s winter streets or in
a bus or a boat at dusk, or in the densest
solitude, that of night festivity, under the sound
of shadows and bells, in the very cave of human pleasure,
have I wanted to stop and seek the timeless fathomless vein
I touched in a stone once or in the lightning a kiss released.
(Whatever in grain like a yellow history
of small swelling breasts keeps repeating its number
ceaselessly tender in the germinal shells,
and identical always, what strips to ivory,
and what is clear native land welling up, a bell
from remotest snows to the blood-sown waves.)
I could grasp only a clump of faces or masks
thrown down like rings of hollow gold,
like scattered clothes, daughters of a rabid autumn
that shook the fearful races’ cheerless tree.
I had no place to rest my hand,
none running like linked springwater
or firm as a chunk of anthracite or crystal
to give back the warmth or cold of my outstretched hand.
What was man? Where in his simple talk
amid shops and whistles, in which of his metallic motions
lived the indestructible, the imperishable—life?