itself.
Do you understand what has gone before? Well then,
You will guess more easily what we have to follow.
Death and sex are symbols of division in chaos.
Life lies on the Whole, along a circumference pure.
Duality is distress, like the image of pins in mirrors.
The first law of optics is the eye: and the first law
Of Life is Time, the endless tepid all-consuming ray.
Consider the magic of your wife or your daughterâs
Love, so partial a gift, defenceless against iron.
Why is this? Because the receiver is partial not whole.
Imperfect of reception, you are a ventriloquistâs idiot,
Acting and speaking by inherited voices and vices.
Now what is dumber than the voice of the dummy?
What more deadly than the voice of Esau in Jacob?
I will provide a text for your refreshment here:
Let it come like a foreign grace between the food
And the tongue, between the lip and the next glass.
It is: nothing can save you, because salvation
Is in what is lost, not saved: what is spent unmeasured.
Think, even as you sit here blessing you are cursed.
As you turn in your minds to escape you are damned.
The detention is ended, Ladies
And gentlemen: or what is worse perhaps,
Men and women: or what is worst of all
Children: for we speak to children under the title of Man.
Farewell.
1980/ 1940
THE PRAYER-WHEEL
THE PRAYER-WHEEL 1
(1939)
Only to affirm in time
That sequence dwells in consequence,
The Riverâs quietly flowing muscle
Turning in the hollow cup
Will teach the human compromise.
Sword and pen win nothing here
Underneath the human floor:
Loved and loving move between
The counterpoint of universes,
Neither less and neither more.
The sage upon his snowy wheel
Secure among the flight of circles
By the calculus of prayer
Underneath the human floor
Founds a commune in the heart.
Time in loveâs diurnal motion,
Suffering untold migrations,
Islanded and garlanded,
Deep as the ministry of fishes
Lives by a perpetual patience.
Teach us the already known,
Turning in the invisible saucer
By a perfect recreation
Air and water mix and part.
Reaffirm the loverâs process,
Faith and love in flesh alloyed,
Spring the cisterns of the heart:
Build the house of entertainment
On the cold circumference
Candle-pointed in the Void.
Cross the threshold of the circle
Turning in its mesmerism
On the fulcrum of the Breath:
Learn the lovely mannerism
Of a perfect art-in-death.
Think: two amateurs in Eden,
Spaces in the voiceless garden,
Ancestors whose haunted faces
Met upon the appleâs bruises,
Broke the lovely spell of pardon.
Flower, with your pure assertion,
Mythical and sea-born olive,
Share the indivisible air,
Teach the human compromise:
From a zero, plus or minus,
Born into the great Appearance,
Building cities deep in gardens,
Deeply still the law divines us
In its timeless incoherence.
What is known is never written.
By the equal distribution
He and She and It are genders,
Sparks of carbon on the circle
Meeting in the porch of sex.
Faces mix and numbers mingle
Many aspects of the One
Teach the human compromise.
Speech will never stain the blue,
Nor the loverâs occult kisses
Hold the curves of Paradise.
The voices have their dying fall.
The fingers resting on the heart,
The dumb petitions in the churchyard
Under the European sword
Spell out our tribal suicide.
Grass is green but goes to smoke:
You, my friend, and you, and you,
Breathe on the divining crystal,
Cut down History, the oak:
Prepare us for the sword and pistol.
1948/ 1940
1 Originally published as âPoem in Space and Timeâ.
GREEN MAN
Four small nouns I put to pasture,
Lambs of cloud on a green paper.
My love leans like a beadle at her book,
Her smile washes the seven cities.
I am the springâs greenest publicity,
And my poem is all wrist and elbow.
O I am not daedal and need wings,
My oracle kisses a black wand.
One great verb I dip in ink
For the
Do you understand what has gone before? Well then,
You will guess more easily what we have to follow.
Death and sex are symbols of division in chaos.
Life lies on the Whole, along a circumference pure.
Duality is distress, like the image of pins in mirrors.
The first law of optics is the eye: and the first law
Of Life is Time, the endless tepid all-consuming ray.
Consider the magic of your wife or your daughterâs
Love, so partial a gift, defenceless against iron.
Why is this? Because the receiver is partial not whole.
Imperfect of reception, you are a ventriloquistâs idiot,
Acting and speaking by inherited voices and vices.
Now what is dumber than the voice of the dummy?
What more deadly than the voice of Esau in Jacob?
I will provide a text for your refreshment here:
Let it come like a foreign grace between the food
And the tongue, between the lip and the next glass.
It is: nothing can save you, because salvation
Is in what is lost, not saved: what is spent unmeasured.
Think, even as you sit here blessing you are cursed.
As you turn in your minds to escape you are damned.
The detention is ended, Ladies
And gentlemen: or what is worse perhaps,
Men and women: or what is worst of all
Children: for we speak to children under the title of Man.
Farewell.
1980/ 1940
THE PRAYER-WHEEL
THE PRAYER-WHEEL 1
(1939)
Only to affirm in time
That sequence dwells in consequence,
The Riverâs quietly flowing muscle
Turning in the hollow cup
Will teach the human compromise.
Sword and pen win nothing here
Underneath the human floor:
Loved and loving move between
The counterpoint of universes,
Neither less and neither more.
The sage upon his snowy wheel
Secure among the flight of circles
By the calculus of prayer
Underneath the human floor
Founds a commune in the heart.
Time in loveâs diurnal motion,
Suffering untold migrations,
Islanded and garlanded,
Deep as the ministry of fishes
Lives by a perpetual patience.
Teach us the already known,
Turning in the invisible saucer
By a perfect recreation
Air and water mix and part.
Reaffirm the loverâs process,
Faith and love in flesh alloyed,
Spring the cisterns of the heart:
Build the house of entertainment
On the cold circumference
Candle-pointed in the Void.
Cross the threshold of the circle
Turning in its mesmerism
On the fulcrum of the Breath:
Learn the lovely mannerism
Of a perfect art-in-death.
Think: two amateurs in Eden,
Spaces in the voiceless garden,
Ancestors whose haunted faces
Met upon the appleâs bruises,
Broke the lovely spell of pardon.
Flower, with your pure assertion,
Mythical and sea-born olive,
Share the indivisible air,
Teach the human compromise:
From a zero, plus or minus,
Born into the great Appearance,
Building cities deep in gardens,
Deeply still the law divines us
In its timeless incoherence.
What is known is never written.
By the equal distribution
He and She and It are genders,
Sparks of carbon on the circle
Meeting in the porch of sex.
Faces mix and numbers mingle
Many aspects of the One
Teach the human compromise.
Speech will never stain the blue,
Nor the loverâs occult kisses
Hold the curves of Paradise.
The voices have their dying fall.
The fingers resting on the heart,
The dumb petitions in the churchyard
Under the European sword
Spell out our tribal suicide.
Grass is green but goes to smoke:
You, my friend, and you, and you,
Breathe on the divining crystal,
Cut down History, the oak:
Prepare us for the sword and pistol.
1948/ 1940
1 Originally published as âPoem in Space and Timeâ.
GREEN MAN
Four small nouns I put to pasture,
Lambs of cloud on a green paper.
My love leans like a beadle at her book,
Her smile washes the seven cities.
I am the springâs greenest publicity,
And my poem is all wrist and elbow.
O I am not daedal and need wings,
My oracle kisses a black wand.
One great verb I dip in ink
For the
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