FOUR

the moon looked into my window it touched me with its small hands and with curling infantile fingers it understood my eyes cheeks mouth its hands(slipping)felt of my necktie wandered against my shirt and into my body the sharp things fingered tinily my heart life the little hands withdrew, jerkily, themselves quietly they began playing with a button the moon smiled she let go my vest and crept through the window she did not fall she went creeping along the air over houses roofs And out of the east toward her a fragile light bent gatheringly

if being morticed with a dream myself speaks (whispering, suggesting that our souls inhabit whatever is between them) knowing my lips hands the way i move my habits laughter i say you will perhaps pardon, possibly you will comprehend. and how this has arrived your mind may guess if at sunset it should, leaning against me, smile; or(between dawn and twilight)giving your eyes, present me also with the terror of shrines which noone has suspected(but wherein silently always are kneeling the various deaths which are your lover lady:together with what keen innumerable lives he has not lived.

here’s a little mouse)and what does he think about, i wonder as over this floor(quietly with bright eyes)drifts(nobody can tell because Nobody knows, or why jerks Here &, here, gr(oo)ving the room’s Silence)this like a littlest poem a (with wee ears and see? tail frisks) (gonE) “mouse”, We are not the same you and i, since here’s a little he or is it It ? (or was something we saw in the mirror)? therefore we’ll kiss;for maybe what was Disappeared into ourselves who (look). ,startled

but if i should say goodmorning trouble adds up all sorts of quickly things on the slate of that nigger’s face(but If i should say thankyouverymuch mr rosenbloom picks strawberries with beringed hands)but if i Should say solong my tailor chuckles like a woman in a dream(but if i should say Now the all saucers but cups if begin to spoons dance every- should where say over the damned table and we hold lips Eyes everything hands you know what happens)but if i should, Say,

in spite of everything which breathes and moves, since Doom (with white longest hands neatening each crease) will smooth entirely our minds —before leaving my room i turn, and(stooping through the morning)kiss this pillow, dear where our heads lived and were.

you are not going to, dear. You are not going to and i but that doesn’t in the least matter. The big fear Who held us deeply in His fist is no longer, can you imagine it i can’t which doesn’t matter and what does is possibly this dear, that we may resume impact with the inutile collide once more with the imaginable,love,and eat sunlight(do you believe it? i begin to and that doesn’t matter)which i suggest teach us a new terror always which shall brighten carefully these things we consider life. Dear i put my eyes into you but that doesn’t matter further than of old because you fooled the doctors,i touch you with hopesand words and with so and so: we are together, we will kiss or smile or move. It’s different too isn’t it different dear from moving as we, you and i,used to move when i thought you were going to(but that doesn’t matter) when you thought you were going to America. Then moving was a matter of not keeping still;we were two alert lice in the blond hair of nothing

since feeling is first who pays any attention to the syntax of things will never wholly kiss you; wholly to be a fool while Spring is in the world my blood approves, and kisses are a better fate than wisdom lady i swear by all flowers. Don’t cry —the best gesture of my brain is less than your eyelids’ flutter which says we are for each other: then laugh, leaning back in my arms for life’s not a paragraph And death i think is no parenthesis

some ask praise of their fellows but i being otherwise made compose curves and yellows, angles or silences to a less erring end) myself is sculptor of your body’s idiom: the musician of your wrists; the poet who is afraid only to mistranslate a rhythm in your hair, (your fingertips the way you move) the painter of your voice— beyond these elements remarkably nothing is. . . . therefore,lady am i content should any by me carven thing provoke your gesture possibly or any painting(for its own reason)in your lips slenderly should create one least smile (shyly if a poem should lift to me the distinct country of your eyes, gifted with green twilight)

supposing i dreamed this) only imagine, when day has thrilled you are a house around which i am a wind— your walls will not reckon how strangely my life is curved since the best he can do is to peer through windows, unobserved —listen, for(out of all things)dream is noone’s fool; if this wind who i am prowls carefully around this house of you love being such, or such, the normal corners of your heart will never guess how much my wonderful jealousy is dark if light should flower: or laughing sparkle from the shut house(around and around which a poor wind will roam

you are like the snow only purer fleeter, like the rain only sweeter frailer you whom certain flowers ressemble but trembling(cowards which fear to miss within your least gesture the hurting skill which lives)and since nothing lingers beyond a little instant, along with rhyme and with laughter O my lady (and every brittle marvelous breathing thing) since i and you are on our ways to dust of your fragility (but chiefly of your smile, most suddenly which is of love and death a marriage)you give me courage so that against myself the sharp days slobber in vain: Nor am i afraid that this, which we call autumn, cleverly dies and over the ripe world wanders with a near and careful smile in his mouth(making everything suddenly old and with his awkward eyes pushing sleep under and thoroughly into all beautiful things) winter, whom Spring shall kill

because you go away i give roses who will advise even yourself, lady in the most certainly(of what we everywhere do not touch)deep things; remembering ever so tinily these, your crisp eyes actually shall contain new faeries (and if your slim lips are amused, no wisest painter of fragile Marys will understand how smiling may be made as skilfully.) But carry also, with that indolent and with this flower wholly whom you do not ever fear, me in your heart softly;not all but the beginning of mySelf

you being in love will tell who softly asks in love, am i separated from your body smile brain hands merely to become the jumping puppets of a dream? oh i mean: entirely having in my careful how careful arms created this at length inexcusable, this inexplicable pleasure—you go from several persons:believe me that strangers arrive when i have kissed you into a memory slowly, oh seriously —that since and if you disappear solemnly myselves ask “life, the question how do i drink dream smile and how do i prefer this face to another and why do i weep eat sleep—what does the whole intend” they wonder. ohandthey cry “to be,being,thatiamalive this absurd fraction in its lowest terms with everything cancelled but shadows —what does it all come down to? love? Love if you like and i like, for the reason that i hate people and lean out of this window is love,love and the reason that i laugh and breathe is oh love and the reason that i do not fall into this street is love.”

Nobody wears a yellow flower in his buttonhole he is altogether a queer fellow as young as he is old when autumn comes, who twiddles his white thumbs and frisks down the boulevards without his coat and hat —(and i wonder just why that should please him or i wonder what he does) and why(at the bottom of this trunk, under some dirty collars)only a moment (or was it perhaps a year)ago i found staring me in the face a dead yellow small rose

it is so long since my heart has been with yours shut by our mingling arms through a darkness where new lights begin and increase, since your mind has walked into my kiss as a stranger into the streets and colours of a town— that i have perhaps forgotten how, always(from these hurrying crudities of blood and flesh)Love coins His most gradual gesture, and whittles life to eternity —after which our separating selves become museums filled with skilfully stuffed memories

i am a beggar always who begs in your mind (slightly smiling, patient, unspeaking with a sign on his breast BLIND)yes i am this person of whom somehow you are never wholly rid(and who does not ask for more than just enough dreams to live on) after all, kid you might as well toss him a few thoughts a little love preferably, anything which you can’t pass off on other people: for instance a plugged promise— then he will maybe(hearing something fall into his hat)go wandering after it with fingers;till having found what was thrown away himself taptaptaps out of your brain, hopes, life to(carefully turning a corner)never bother you any more.

if within tonight’s erect everywhere of black muscles feels a weightless slowness(deftly muting the world’s texture with drifted gifts of featheriest slenderness and how gradually which descending are suddenly received)or by doomfull connivance accurately thither and hither myself struts unremembered(rememberingly with in both pockets curled hands moves) why then toward morning he is a ghost whom assault these whispering fists of hail (and a few windows awaken certain faces busily horribly blunder through new light hush we are made of the same thing as perhaps nothing, he murmurs carefully lying down)

how this uncouth enchanted person, arising from a restaurant, looks breathes or moves —climbing(past light after light)to turn, disappears the very swift and invisibly living rhythm of your Heart possibly will understand; or why(in this most exquisite of cities)all of the long night a fragile imitation of (perhaps)myself carefully wanders streets dark and, deep with rain. . . . (he, slightly whom or cautiously this person and this imitation resemble, descends into the earth with the year a cigarette between his ghost-lips gradually) remembering badly, softly your kissed thrice suddenly smile

i go to this window just as day dissolves when it is twilight(and looking up in fear i see the new moon thinner than a hair) making me feel how myself has been coarse and dull compared with you, silently who are and cling to my mind always But now she sharpens and becomes crisper until i smile with knowing —and all about herself the sprouting largest final air plunges inward with hurled downward thousands of enormous dreams