Léonie Adams

This is the time lean woods shall spend A steeped-up twilight, and the pale evening drink, And the perilous roe, the leaper to the west brink, Trembling and bright to the caverned cloud descend. Now shall you see pent oak gone gusty and frantic, Stooped with dry weeping, ruinously unloosing The sparse disheveled leaf, or reared and tossing A dreary scarecrow bough in funeral antic. Then, tatter you and rend, Oak heart, to your profession mourning; not obscure The outcome, not crepuscular; on the deep floor Sable and gold match lustres and contend. And rags of shrouding will not muffle the slain. This is the immortal extinction, the priceless wound Not to be staunched. The live gold leaks beyond, And matter’s sanctified, dipped in a gold stain.

(From a Persian Carpet) Ash and strewments, the first moth-wings, pale Ardour of brief evenings, on the fecund wind; Or all a wing, less than wind, Breath of low herbs upfloats, petal or wing, Haunting the musk precincts of burial. For the season of newer riches moves triumphing, Of the evanescence of deaths. These potpourris Earth-tinctured, jet insect-bead, cinder of bloom— How weigh while a great summer knows increase, Ceaselessly risen, what there entombs?— Of candour fallen from the slight stems of Mays, Corrupt of the rim a blue shades, pensively: So a fatigue of wishes will young eyes. And brightened, unpurged eyes of revery, now Not to glance to fabulous groves again! For now deep presence is, and binds its close, And closes down the wreathed alleys escape of sighs. And now rich time is weaving, hidden tree, The fable of orient threads from bough to bough. Old rinded wood, whose lissomeness within Has reached from nothing to its covering These many corymbs’ flourish!—And the green Shells which wait amber, breathing, wrought Towards the still trance of summer’s centering, Motives by ravished humble fingers set, Each in a noon of its own infinite. And here is leant the branch and its repose of the deep leaf to the pilgrim plume. Repose, Inflections brilliant and mute of the voyager, light! And here the nests, and freshet throats resume Notes over and over found, names For the silvery ascensions of joy. Nothing is here But moss and its bells now of the root’s night; But the beetle’s bower, and arc from grass to grass For the flight in gauze. Now its fresh lair, Grass-deep, nestles the cool eft to stir Vague newborn limbs, and the bud’s dark winding has Access of day. Now on the subtle noon Time’s image, at pause with being, labours free Of all its charge, for each in coverts laid, Of clement kind; and everlastingly, In some elision of bright moments is known, Changed wide as Eden, the branch whose silence sways Dazzle of the murmurous leaves to continual tone; Its separations, sighing to own again Being of the ignorant wish; and sways to sight, Waked from it nighted, the marvelous foundlings of light; Risen and weaving from the ceaseless root A divine ease whispers toward fruitfulness, While all a summer’s conscience tempts the fruit.

When tunes jigged nimbler than the blood And quick and high the bows would prance And every fiddle string would burst To catch what’s lost beyond the string, While half afraid their children stood, I saw the old come out to dance. The heart is not so light at first, But heavy like a bough in spring.

Send forth the high falcon flying after the mind Till it come toppling down from its cold cloud: The beak of the falcon to pierce it till it fall Where the simple heart is bowed. O in wild innocence it rides The rare ungovernable element, But once it sways to terror and descent, The marches of the wind are its abyss, No wind staying it upward of the breast— Let mind be proud for this, And ignorant from what fabulous cause it dropt, Or with how learned a gesture the unschooled heart Shall lull both terror and innocence to rest.

Light at each point was beating then to flight, The sapling bark flushed upward, and the welling Tips of the wood touched, touched at the bound, And boughs were slight and burdened beyond telling Toward that caress of the boughs a summer’s night, Illimitable in fragrance and in sound. Here were the blue buds, earlier than hope, Unnumbered, beneath the leaves, a breath apart, Wakening in root-dusk. When the air went north, Lifting the oakleaves from the northern slope, Their infinite young tender eyes looked forth. Here all that was, was frail to bear a heart.

Now I have tempered haste, The joyous traveller said, The steed has passed me now Whose hurrying hooves I fled. My spectre rides thereon, I learned what mount he has, Upon what summers fed; And wept to know again, Beneath the saddle swung, Treasure for whose great theft This breast was wrung. His bridle bells sang out, I could not tell their chime, So brilliantly he rings, But called his name as Time. His bin was morning light, Those straws which gild his bed Are of the fallen West. Although green lands consume Beneath their burning tread, In everlasting bright His hooves have rest.

I was enriched, not casting after marvels, But as one walking in a usual place, Without desert but common eyes and ears, No recourse but to hear, power but to see, Got to love you of grace. Subtle musicians, that could body wind, Or contrive strings to anguish, in conceit Random and artless strung a branch with bells, Fixed in one silver whim, which at a touch Shook and were sweet. And you, you lovely and unpurchased note, One run distraught, and vexing hot and cold To give to the heart’s poor confusion tongue, By chance caught you, and henceforth all unlearned Repeats you gold.

This that is washed with weed and pebblestone Curved once a dolphin’s length before the prow, And I who read the land to which we bore In its grave eyes, question my idol now, What cold and marvelous fancy it may keep, Since the salt terror swept us from our course, Or if a wisdom later than the storm, For old green ocean’s tinctured it so deep; And with some reason to me on this strand The waves, the ceremonial waves have come, And stooped their barbaric heads, and all flung out Their glittering arms before them, and are gone, Leaving the murderous tribute lodged in sand.

Gold shed upon suckling gold, The time of the bole blackens, Of the dark mounted through dapple, While in the sealed apple The seed cradled toward cold. A gold on gold spent, Put by from an elm in its years Now its gilded of days, Over turf’s dishevelment; Where all which is green sickens, All the fresh shall be sere. All which is green sickens, And it is but for a time Those embered veinings blaze A year’s delirium; Or neared of other space, Unportioned azure shall close One of more, and which is, One which goes. Let the little pupils that will, Of vision, gaze for salt To whet their gazing, wit In one weather is high From burrow and lair, by Nether providences’ default An all’s accrued. And apposite, beyond Such primer beholdings, has Its long accounting known The beetle’s morsel thus Was rich, and the slug’s bed on The oak’s generations, deep Over the lark’s bones. In slough of Edens fast Wit in one weather shall stand, While millennia nibble at The sensual apple Toppled it net, Plenty in the palm of the hand, And the fallen not fallen, not lost From out its certitude— For our unbeggaring Has been gross. Few and late To cherish an immoderate Wish, hope’s calculus, Love’s hope; few to miss, From natural tally thrust, In the lime-girdled space Of choice, where alone Man can abandon what Is only his own; And in cold and tarrying Their rearisers sleep: While to the granite cheek Light’s purples bring Infinite their ministering, And past our finial And ragged crests, to keep Time’s ambient stood, Propose horizons from Their shadowy quarries; while, In an unwandered wood, Or under the indifferent foot, Is let fall, let fall a fruit, Through eternal leisures down, For but time’s unravelling.

Now the rich cherry, whose sleek wood, And top with silver petals traced Like a strict box its gems encased, Has spilt from out that cunning lid, All in an innocent green round, Those melting rubies which it hid; With moss ripe-strawberry-encrusted, So birds get half, and minds lapse merry To taste that deep-red, lark’s-bite berry, And blackcap bloom is yellow-dusted. The wren that thieved it in the eaves A trailer of the rose could catch To her poor droopy sloven thatch, And side by side with the wren’s brood— O lovely time of beggar’s luck— Opens the quaint and hairy bud; And full and golden is the yield Of cows that never have to house, But all night nibble under boughs, Or cool their sides in the moist field. Into the rooms flow meadow airs, The warm farm baking smell’s blown round. Inside and out, and sky and ground Are much the same; the wishing star, Hesperus, kind and early born, Is risen only finger-far; All stars stand close in summer air, And tremble, and look mild as amber; When wicks are lighted in the chamber, They are like stars which settled there. Now straightening from the flowery hay, Down the still light the mowers look, Or turn, because their dreaming shook, And they waked half to other days, When left alone in the yellow stubble The rusty-coated mare would graze. Yet thick the lazy dreams are born, Another thought can come to mind, But like the shivering of the wind, Morning and evening in the corn.