The Two Crosses O wide-winged crucifixion in the sky, Floating in a light of sempiternal ease, Singing in a fire of incorruptible joy— Bird with full stretch of golden reverie Spanning thy own vast soul and breaking forth To sapphire liberties of the Unknown! O same bright body that on blinded earth Liest pinned by steely spikes of mortal law, With human hands thrown out in time's fatigue, Palms bearing the dark boon of torn life-blood, Nails frozen to a sky's blue cut and crushed! O supine sorrowful creature, lift thy gaze There where the invisible cross creating all And speeding all to the Space-Self's four extreme

Lament and Rhapsody Lost are the ancient mournings, the old mirths Of Gods grown men, holding the world in their hearts And breaking with its beauty and its bale And washing with blood of roses every limb! The epic's hurricane, the lyric's gurgle, The pastoral's tremolo of bending reeds, The drama's splendoured hells and darkling heavens— And through them all the Voice without a name, Crying beyond power, passion, pleasure, pang, Hushing to an ecstasy that has blind eyes And sees but through a hole suddenly shining In the magic centre of the marbled brow! Then were the Angels afloat, the Devils wore wings, And even

Eternity Vain is the immensity of the one God If all that vast is but intolerance Of time and life and earth's long cry for love! No laughter crosses with its rippling light Monotonies of measureless Self-space Where Being broods on Being evermore And heaven seeks not heaven in a hundred shapes. Undepthed of the One the many are futile foam; But losing the love-smite of soul on soul The single God is a darkness in full noon! O we must shatter the walls of mortal mind, Grow white waves of the universal sea, Win our true selves by loss in the breakless All; But how shall loss of narrow humanhood— The small snake with its tail

-038_God^s elephant.htm God's Elephant Why art thou slow, with grey somnambulist gait, Eyes like small gems gripped in a giant rock, An elephant swaying to some dense delight Whose mystery bulks too heavy for time's heart? "Loaded with a dream out measuring common deed, Ponderous I come and all swift slynesses Laugh to themselves, 'He never shall lay bare The wisdom-grandeur locked in that huge head.' Dust are these wanton jeering, when I hold Their doom in my belly of beatitude! Little they guess the immobile Vigilling And the enormous hesitation pack A plenitude's power deep and more deep within Like the drawn cord of some omniscient bow

The Missing Touch Evening The west is a giant Tamburlaine Bannering with a sky of blood the marching main. The east, a hush of white world-witchery, Is some unveiled supreme Zenocraté. Yet one transfiguring touch both marvels miss, Touch that would bring an infinite of bliss, And in that one touch lost by sun sublime And moon intense are all the tears of time! Dream after mystic dream my painter heart Mixes to erase the tiny shadow and smart Spoiling earth's mightiest mood of loveliness. Vain are all dreams—for O the little less That kills perfection, blinds eternity, Is the puny spot of self I grasp as me! If I

-017_Beauty^s patting.htm Beauty's Patting What secrets suddenly peer Through the flicker-point of beauty's parting And the twinkled cry of its vanishing tear But never through the laugh and light of its starting?. . . All day the sun is glorious thunder, But taking his opalescent leave After the last wine-flush of wonder— Hinting the mother-of-pearl that is eve, He puts on our lip a finger that closes All speech—and mysteries tremble and wake In the wink of an instant!. . .The star-spotted snake Coil after indigo coil unlooses And our eyes are crowded with peace or power But the touch beyond thinking is gone—till the hour When t

Ideal I crave not poised perfection in my words, Jewelled complacence cut to a self-muse. Song dense with such cool beauty is the goal Of the mere finite, haloing its own heart, Crystalling a godhead of the small and brief. Beyond this beauty, above all perfect poise Arches the Ineffable who is endless light, A noon that has no dawn or sunsetting, Yet every moment a fresh noon whose veil Is the vast zenith which was white before: Paradise on paradise ever new, He moves In a myriad miracle of the measureless! How shall the rapture of a gemmed repose, Safe in locked luster, brilliantly blind, Throbbing to no hush-haunted distances—

Goddess Earth O I am earth's idolater! Truth's peak Is here when the head bows, touching dense clay: In the blue beyond are time's foundations laid, Downward the mystery of the Eternal plunges, Inverted pyramid whose triumphant top Of absolute all-penetrating force Is clay—source of deep hurt, peril to life— Smallest among God's self-disclosing deeds— Because sheer point and acme of miracle! Blind are we, dreading or despising earth. She comes so dense by concentrated dream. Grandeur and grace of granite—fearful strength— But O the unbreakable beatitude That is God's grip when rapture is all rock! A dumbness and a d

God is Asleep! God is asleep! The great eyes keep No watch on us: Love-luminous Are they with the gleam Of a magic dream In which they behold Man's heart a gold Of deathless light: Never they sight The sobbing dark We hark and hark Within our breast. Vainly we quest Power from that glance Of lonely trance To change our own Life's trembling tone. O we must break The trance awake And free the dense Omnipotence, Making it know The world is woe And not the bliss God's dream-abyss Kindles to Him! Until the gaze Of God outblaze To catch the dim Misery belo

Vision Splendid Magic gem-cutter, lapidary of light, Transmuter of the crystalling consciousness, Swiftly converting each dull bead of glass To flawless and omniscient Koh-I-Noor! Soon may thy plan scintillate into sight, A myriad divinity of diamond Set in a sable vast of silences, A heart of unified humanity Immense with the invisible muse of the One, Wakeful within to numberless life-beats Silvering out in the abysm of clay Star-moments of a paradisal peace! An adamantine energy shall break Each mortal bound, yet seem for ever still, Even as Arcturus and his fiery hosts Hurl with undreamable speed through i