A Baroque Wall-Fountain in the Villa Sciarra

for Dore and Adja Under the bronze crown Too big for the head of the stone cherub whose feet A serpent has begun to eat, Sweet water brims a cockle and braids down Past spattered mosses, breaks On the tipped edge of a second shell, and fills The massive third below. It spills In threads then from the scalloped rim, and makes A scrim or summery tent For a faun-ménage and their familiar goose. Happy in all that ragged, loose Collapse of water, its effortless descent And flatteries of spray, The stocky god upholds the shell with ease, Watching, about his shaggy knees, The goatish innocence of his babes at play; His fauness all the while Leans forward, slightly, into a clambering mesh Of water-lights, her sparkling flesh In a saecular ecstasy, her blinded smile Bent on the sand floor Of the trefoil pool, where ripple-shadows come And go in swift reticulum, More addling to the eye than wine, and more Interminable to thought Than pleasure’s calculus. Yet since this all Is pleasure, flash, and waterfall, Must it not be too simple? Are we not More intricately expressed In the plain fountains that Maderna set Before St. Peter’s—the main jet Struggling aloft until it seems at rest In the act of rising, until The very wish of water is reversed, That heaviness borne up to burst In a clear, high, cavorting head, to fill With blaze, and then in gauze Delays, in a gnatlike shimmering, in a fine Illumined version of itself, decline, And patter on the stones its own applause? If that is what men are Or should be, if those water-saints display The pattern of our aret ê , What of these showered fauns in their bizarre, Spangled, and plunging house? They are at rest in fulness of desire For what is given, they do not tire Of the smart of the sun, the pleasant water-douse And riddled pool below, Reproving our disgust and our ennui With humble insatiety. Francis, perhaps, who lay in sister snow Before the wealthy gate Freezing and praising, might have seen in this No trifle, but a shade of bliss— That land of tolerable flowers, that state As near and far as grass Where eyes become the sunlight, and the hand Is worthy of water: the dreamt land Toward which all hungers leap, all pleasures pass.