Walter Conrad Arensberg
Reading edition
VOYAGE À L’INFINI
The swan existing
Is like a song with an accompaniment
Imaginary.
Across the grassy lake,
Across the lake to the shadow of the willows,
It is accompanied by an image—
As by Debussy’s
“Reflets dans l’eau.”
The swan that is
Reflects
Upon the solitary water—breast to breast
With the duplicity:
“The other one!”
And breast to breast it is confused.
O visionary wedding! O stateliness of the procession!
It is accompanied by the image of itself
Alone.
At night
The lake is a wide silence,
Without imagination.
14
AT DAYBREAK
I had a dream and I awoke with it—
Poor little thing that I had not unclasped
After the kiss good-by.
And at the surface how it gasped—
This thing that I had loved in the unlit
Depth of the drowsy sea....
Ah me!
This thing with which I drifted toward the sky.
Driftwood upon a wave—
Senseless the motion that it gave.
TO HASEKAWA
Perhaps it is no matter that you died.
Life’s an incognito which you saw through:
You never told on life—you had your pride;
But life has told on you.
DIALOGUE
Be patient, Life, when Love is at the gate,
And when he enters let him be at home.
Think of the roads that he has had to roam.
Think of the years that he has had to wait.
But if I let Love in I shall be late.
Another has come first—there is no room.
And I am thoughtful of the endless loom—
Let Love be patient, the importunate.
O Life, be idle and let Love come in,
And give thy dreamy hair that Love may spin.
15But Love himself is idle with his song.
Let Love come last, and then may Love last long.
Be patient, Life, for Love is not the last.
Be patient now with Death, for Love has passed.
SONG OF THE SOULS SET FREE
Wrap the earth in cloudy weather
For a shroud.
We have slipped the earthly tether,
We’re above the cloud.
Peep and draw the cloud together,
Peep upon the bowed.
What can they be bowing under,
Wild and wan?
Peep, and draw the cloud asunder,
Peep, and wave a dawn.
It will make them rise and wonder
Whether we are gone.