II
We were interested in ways of being
We saw lives
We saw animals
We saw agile rodents
Scala rodent
The harmonic pencil
Scala rodent
Emits its fundamental
The stricken plethora
A bottle of water against a very blue sky
A toppling shutter
The final peninsulas of space
Germinate in the secret ovoid perimeter
e.g.: scholia
The white hill
Elastic fatigue
The white lax hill and immediately the iced antelope
The line warps
The meridian of least resistance ascends the sky
The brain ferments
The curdled brain
The repercussion
The bullweaver
Obsessed by an ideograph
A mechanical bracelet
A small diesel engine
First one and then the other
Air congeals in water
The mural rift
A kind of going
The little wooden block
That long snarl of coast on the Mediterranean
The heart inclines
The four triangles
The fifth
The fingers jerk
The green cheek
The fourth
The image in the portal
The resin curls
The soggy mitten
The third
The cleaved cough
The second
The closing ribs
The first
The double envoi
The grackle breaks
Sweat
The diverse arrows
The anagogic eye
III
This is the winter of the hardest year
And did you dream
The white the large
The slow movement
The type of dream
The terror
The stumble stone
The winter the snow that was there
The neck and the hand
The head
The snow that was in the air
The long sun
The exodus of thought
The enervated violin
The singing song and the sung
The lengthy home
The trundling endless stairs
The young stone
Homing and the song
The air that was there
Flayed jaws piled on the steps
The twirling rain
And laying they repeat the horizon
Ineffably to know how it goes swollen and then not swollen
Cold and then too warm
So many minor electrocutions
So many slaps of nausea
The keen eyelids
The abrupt diastole
That leaves you wondering
Why it was ever despite their assurances unlocked
Stars like lice along the scalp
The brain pan bitten burning
And dull on one foot
And dull on one foot
O cry aloud
O teeth unbound
Don’t you know that the stone walk alone
Do you know the shredded brow
Are you aware
Do you take this forever concentric bland freezing to touch
Let the scarlet rustle
Let the globes come down
Let the oblate spheroids fall infinitely away
Forever away always falling but you can always see them
The creak
The squeak that makes you so slightly open your mouth
Patiently to be strangled
It is gone away somewhere
It is Winter
Reason
Winter
Ache
IX
The bell
Too softly and too slowly tolled
And the first wave was snow
The second ice
The third fire
The fourth blood
The fifth adders
The sixth smother
The seventh foul stink
And unnumbered beasts swam in the sea
Some feather footed
Some devoid of any feet
And all with fiery eyes
And phosphorescent breath
The enduring bell
The wash of wave
The wiry cranes that stagger in the air
The hooded eyes struggling in the confused littoral
The smoky cloak
Those who walk
Those who are constrained
Those who watch the hole of wavering dark
There is no order in expectation
The feet fall
Even the enemy of cold labor
Of the mighty tongue
The gull matted on the sand
Worms spilling out of the beak
The cervical agony
Unplumbed and unforgotten caves
A cry sent up in expectation
A mouth filling the sky
Shaping the words of the victor
The bell
A voice
Blessed are the dead who die
The generations of generations
They were in an unstable condition
Floating about in a putrid fog
Throughout the tangled forest
Between the charred trunks
Over the yellow marshes
Some squirmed after the manner of lizards
Some were upright with their arms held up
Some lay with their knees partly drawn up
Some lay on their sides
Some lay stretched at full length
Some lay on their backs
Some were stooping
Some held their heads bent down
Some drew up their legs
Some embraced
Some kicked out with arms and legs
Some were kneeling
Some stood and inhaled deep breaths
Some crawled
Some walked
Some felt about in the dark
Some arose
Some gazed, sitting still
Light
Light
The sliver in the firmament
The stirring horde
The rocking wave
The name breaks in the sky
Why stand we
Why go we nought
They broken seek the cleaving balance
The young men gone
Lux lucis
The revolving company
The water flowing from the right side
Et fons luminis
The ciborium of the abyss
The bread of light
The chalice of the byss
The wine of flaming light
The wheeling multitude
The rocking cry
The reverberant scalar song lifts up
The metric finger aeon by aeon
And the cloud of memory descends
The regnant fruitful vine
The exploding rock
The exploding mountain cry
Tris agios
The sapphire snow
Hryca hryca nazaza
* A long excerpt from this poem was originally published in An “Objectivists’’ Anthology (Le Beausset: To Publishers, 1932).