Words Let me not utter five things in five words, But by one word of densest diamond Pack five things to a shining secrecy That gathers a deep truth missed by them all; Or else with five words capture one sole thing, Pluck from it fires that light up earth's abysm— Fires that were veiled by being locked together, But now a fourfold seizure from without Of splendours and terrors ruling time and space And then a sudden self-sight, a fifth flame That knows by a sheer eternity within! . . . Words have not come to measure things that are; They plunge to the unheard, leap to the unseen, Being ear and eye a chaos of surprise Till

Soul of Song I have been quiet a long while To fill my singing smile With a magic beyond the lips of man. And very quiet will I be After the burst of minstrelsy To find at the close The light with which my tune began. Glowing behind The singer's mind, A mystery journeys forth to meet Across the rapture of rhyming feet Its own unplumbed repose. Come then, O listeners, with a tranquil mood To feel far more than the loud heart knows; Or else the King who moves through the common word Shall never be heard And keep unseen the strange infinitude He bears above our mortal woes, The purple of his drea

Here And Now Why, Soul, look ever ahead to the unborn Gods? The flute of the future can pour its goldenest honey Even now if the ear is tuned to the inmost hush. The ecstatic end is each instant: here on thy brow Sit all the epiphanies. Lustres that gather Today are no flowerless path to paradise, But a music and mystery hiding every heaven Washed by the secret waves of prophecy. Lovely the rainbowed horizon, the shimmery heart Of the dreaming distance, but to live afar Is blindness toward the deeps of wine within!. . . Leaping below to unbuttoned bliss, the gap Twixt throb and aching throb of the pulse of life Crypts in

The Blind Bellow O the blind bellow in the pit of sleep! galloping strength lifts a huge neck of night To utter some lost luminosity But breaks into a blank of raptureless roar. Eyes that are suns covered with lids that are rock Yearn for a lightning-stroke from thunderous heavens Where power is one self-lustered harmony. No answer flashes down to the vague cry. The burning heart is beating ecstasy's rhythm Yet the broad tongue is a grey bitterness; The ears are deaf to the bright truth within. The wild breath seeks rose-pastured paradise— All that it wins are grasses without sap, Rare tufts fringing relentless crook

Wondrous Waking If the whole cosmic utterance suddenly ceased, The ocean's roar died down nor even came The vague and wavering whisper of thin leaves, The deepest slumber would be struck awake By that immeasurable surprise of hush! So too the gloom of ignorant mortal mind, That ever-present sleep with open eyes, Breaks under a vast pressure of potent peace When all a sudden the multitudinous lure Of transient things wafts never more its call And the heart is left with fathomless secrecies. Time washed in vast white waters of inwardness Throbs through still space a cosmic chastity— The universe moves divine with no desire,

The Signature: Sharp-hewn yet undertoned with mystery, A brief black sign from the Incommunicable Making the Eternal's Night mix with our day To deepen and deepen the shallow goldenness We hug to our heart! Laughing whip-lash of love That leaves a wonder-weal holding bright secrets Within its snake whose coils are centuries But whose straight sweep is the backbone of One Bliss! The characters go flaming up and down With all time's venture twixt two ecstatic ends. Clutching with gentle finger our dumb desire A slanting full-bodied soar loops a firm loop Of light around some lone invisible peak— Followed by steady twin strokes

Art Beyond Art O where in painter's hue, musician's tone Is the marvel touch of the myriadly Alone Whom without hands our hunger has to seek And whose clairaudient cave and prophet peak Are found like a burst of self-discovery Blotting the mind with hushed eternity? How shall tense poet or keen sculptor know The vault of wonder stunning all below— A never-resting never-moving sky, Huge mouth unheard, far sun outvasting the eye? Only the vigil of the worshipping heart Carries the one apocalyptic art, The power to fashion the whole body anew, Mirroring the All-Beautiful, echoing the All-True! 2-6-48 P

Goddess A goddess rapt in the sun of her timeless self Waits ever aloof with shut eyes and lips sealed, Both arms lifted to a bodiless blue beyond. A mystery burns that I can never grasp: I search and search through void eternities And my blood is a song in the dark with drift unknown. But, while that face is a superhuman dream And the figure a farness of transcendent bliss, The feet touch earth and give themselves to me— Feet that are standing still, yet with a calm As of all boundaries reached and journeys done: Here time lies conquered neath a weight of trance. Light has come down—a heaven close to clay Keeps offering to my b

Altamira In the cave of Altamira, hidden afar On walls of ancient rock, lie the dawn-streaks Of art, the painter soul's awakening To animal beauty and animal energy— Bison for ever caught by primitive hands! But older than this cave, a secrecy Hung between earth and eternity, is the rapt Room of the inmost reverie within man. Here hides a power of world-creating art, Here dawns the ultimate simplicity From whose omniscient oneness springs the birth Of the million moods that make our universe. The truth-soul Vigilling through time's changing tones Writes, on the walls of this profound of trance, Visions which archetype

Strange Enemy Coward who criest to lose a single soul, Yellow heart lapped in the omnipotent sun, Traitor who flingers' our loves to heavenly hands, Fifth-columnist of fire, hooded in hush To break a door of dreams through Matter's sleep Or else to hide a time-bomb in our heart For blowing up wife and child to eternity! Torpedo to our lusts and luxuries, Magnetic mine for shipwrecks of desire, Diver with gold block-busters from the Inane, Huge paratrooper out of primal Night, Now have I caught Thy stratagem of the Unknown, Broadcasting bliss from radios under earth, Swooping, on the myriad cries that quiver and clash,