The old man is leaning on garden gate,
Rust in his palm;
Now in the purple evening he enters,
Crisscrosses of sun on his back;
Now he holds a slender rose by the neck.
And I paint the billboards Persian night.
Who is this lady spying from her window?
And what strange plant hides her face?
Below the stucco wall in frenzied earth,
A man works in the shadow of her glance.
Sophy, they say, walks along in forests,
Twigs never cling to her checkered shirt;
And she returns with armloads of lumber,
Her voices crackles with the purple hearth.
This lady has a garden of watermelons;
Her cat has yellow eyes, has checkered fur.
Cyrus imagined his anemones as men,
Religion in the roots of his judas trees.
Water, he told me, is the first need
And first of things lacking in reality.
Averroes perished before a magic mountain;
Like as syllogism, he folded on stilts.
In the European streets of memory--
I am buying the last real Persian quilt.
The cat knows too well the measured garden,
The black bees, the plane trees;
She measures herself in a shaft of sunlight,
Man by the shadow of the evening gate.
At the instant of noon, she wrestles with fate
And my airplane is a silver flash in the sky
On the hot sidewalk two girls play marbles,
The marbles are their eyes, red, white
Red in the spring, their lungs are consumed
In the last height of autumn fires.
On the chipped porch, under a slanting roof
A man learns to rock in no wind
Enjoying his Sunday like paradise--
Children rolling over the chances of birth.
These girls also play in the river bed,
Webbed trees bend over their bent heads.
Dusk comes first in the private yard
Where a man makes diagonals in slippered feet
To save wooden chairs from possible skies.
The limbs of Malte Laurids Brigg are there.
I left the ladder leaning on the stucco wall;
I penned in small letters shadowless skies,
Memorable places, Montana, or Persia,
Grand Canyon, or the Gulf of Surprise.
Four rivers spread like a hand--
The circular bird is a solemn decree.
A spade turns, discovers fresh earth,
Tuned . . . to a desolate bird cry,
But the crooked man continues to work.
Dummy face in his alkaline hands, a
Strange coolness invades the private yard
And there he sits, a character in a book.
Why are these two girls always together,
And why don’t their roller skates make a
Sound? In the river bed they eat dry figs,
They smile at me, make pantomimes,
Flutter thin arms like imitations of snow.
In the oldest street, in imaginary snow,
The historical is the personal--
My shoes on the earth’s quadrangle.
Anger quartered in a garden of senses,
Silent amazement from my attic window
As I recall myself exactly, setting
The angle of the ladder on the wall,
Writing the line already in the poem;
And I sit down among my books, like
An old man first seeing the sky. In the
Checkered shadows, by a looking glass,
Dusk descends like the palm, soundlessly,
Of the crooked gardener;
In the garden of four rivers
My stride is the shade of the cypress tree.
On skyless days, in a grey and white
Apron the matron observes her
Natural museum, wonders who’s eaten
The vague leaves of the her thin ranunculi.
An easel is folded by the crackling wall,
As time spans again the small hills,
Stucco limits of the sacred village,
And its ember dies in her grey eyes.
A traveller's eyes are split in the sun,
Greek sun, or a word combination,
And his head goes round like Helios.
And I paint the billboards shades of
Magenta, and leave the paint can absurdly
By the road, the last thing the dying men
See, as they hurry on into magenta night.
I have painted the skies of lyrical flight.
The Persian king dies in the first sunrise,
His flesh in the sand of infinite color,
Describing small gardens in the twilight
Where the griffon stalks, wanders, and
Thinks he is an invention--but his garden
Is not, and the dusk creates another
Doorway, and now he walks--
Now he holds a slender rose by the neck.
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