A Sum of Destructions

The amities of morning and the buxom habits of birds that swing a bell-bright city in their intelligent wings; last night’s squall has drawn off like anger’s tide, the remote and muffled waters beating solitudinous rocks and murmurous in the hidden parts, ebbing and beating, of the mind as some half-forgotten name . . . the rain has withdrawn like the tents and the Greeks, like the hard-to-believe- in days of our childhood. Light moves, the whole massed flotilla of morning, kin to the upward flight of birds returning; and brutality, the hungers and the hatreds seem fabulous, seem members; the gouty rat and straggly root collaborate. Earth in wounds, deaths, decays— past hours its rutted crusts— with the billowy sky is the field- upon-field, and all one, of one master observing the various fruits: somewhere a child in a cage, inferior bodies making a passable road, a girl passionate with pain, an old man watching the earth escape like his once endless strengths, his poems head- long. And one fills with awe—as the town with morning, every cranny, the birds brimming fire- escapes and broken windows— that the earth like some wise breath never balked, a many- membered bird-flight, should include all, must be a terrible good. The eyes passing, contracted from night and war the stars undertook, finally emerge the topgallant of morning, and those eyes roam free as the Greeks: wherever a drop of water is, spindrift city of water gleaming, there is home.