In pale moonlight, stone gods,
Twisted cypress jut
Out from headlands.
Witness how in my dream
The blue eyes of the primevalist
Are colored with a terrible excess:
Too blue, much too blue, entirely
Lacking objectivity, desolate,
Dark, strange, hostile.
Night in the form of mortmain
Breaks itself apart; unfettered,
It parades frog-like,
Sublimely, beautifully,
Pain proceeding from it.
The red-tail hawk I keep
Riffles its feathers, shudders;
Though it is not written in my head
I am writing the object
Of aesthetic composition is not
The individual thing but the idea
Which is striving to reveal itself–Goethe,
In his last days swallowed blood,
And dreamed of summer wheat, instinct
Striking the heart with a thousand years
Of truth and the dead-fleshed body of desire.
Waking, I watched the light curl over the roofs,
More pre-occupied than ever
With the ongoing mystery of my life
