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From Off the Road Database
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<div class="poem">
<p>Cowslip and shad-blow, flaked like tethered foam<br />
Around bared teeth of stallions, bloomed that spring<br />
When first I read thy lines, rife as the loam<br />
Of prairies, yet like breakers cliffward leaping!<br />
O, early following thee, I searched the hill<br />
Blue-writ and odor-firm with violets, 'til<br />
With June the mountain laurel broke through green<br />
And filled the forest with what clustrous sheen!<br />
Potomac lilies, — then the Pontiac rose,<br />
And Klondike edelweiss of occult snows!<br />
White banks of moonlight came descending valleys—<br />
How speechful on oak-vizored palisades,<br />
As vibrantly I following down Sequoia alleys<br />
Heard thunder's eloquence through green arcades<br />
Set trumpets breathing in each clump and grass tuft—'til<br />
Gold autumn, captured, crowned the trembling hill!
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<div class="poem">
<p><i>Panis Angelicus!</i> Eyes tranquil with the blaze<br />
Of love's own diametric gaze, of love's amaze!<br />
Not greatest, thou,—not first, nor last,—but near<br />
And onward yielding past my utmost year.<br />
Familiar, thou, as mendicants in public places;<br />
Evasive—too—as dayspring's spreading arc to trace is:—<br />
Our Meistersinger, thou set breath in steel;<br />
And it was thou who on the boldest heel<br />
Stood up and flung the span on even wing<br />
Of that great Bridge, our Myth, whereof I sing!
</p>
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<div class="poem">
<p>But that star-glistered salver of infinity,<br />
The circle, blind crucible of endless space,<br />
Is sliced by motion,—subjugated never.<br />
Adam and Adam's answer in the forest<br />
Left Hesperus mirrored in the lucid pool.<br />
Now the eagle dominates our days, is jurist<br />
Of the ambiguous cloud. We know the strident rule<br />
Of wings imperious... Space, instantaneous,<br />
Flickers a moment, consumes us in its smile:<br />
A flash over the horizon—shifting gears—<br />
And we have laughter, or more sudden tears.<br />
Dream cancels dream in this new realm of fact<br />
From which we wake into the dream of act;<br />
Seeing himself an atom in a shroud—<br />
Man hears himself an engine in a cloud!
</p>
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<div class="poem">
<p><span class="mw-poem-indented" style="display: inline-block; margin-inline-start: 10em;"> But first, here at this height receive</span><br />
The benediction of the shell's deep, sure reprieve!<br />
Lead-perforated fuselage, escutcheoned wings<br />
Lift agonized quittance, tilting from the invisible brink<br />
Now eagle-bright, now<br />
<span class="mw-poem-indented" style="display: inline-block; margin-inline-start: 10em;"> quarry-hid, twist-</span><br />
<span class="mw-poem-indented" style="display: inline-block; margin-inline-start: 18em;"> -ing, sink with</span><br />
Enormous repercussive list-<br />
<span class="mw-poem-indented" style="display: inline-block; margin-inline-start: 12em;"> -ings down</span><br />
Giddily spiralled<br />
<span class="mw-poem-indented" style="display: inline-block; margin-inline-start: 7em;"> gauntlets, upturned, unlooping</span><br />
In guerrilla sleights, trapped in combustion gyr-<br />
Ing, dance the curdled depth<br />
<span class="mw-poem-indented" style="display: inline-block; margin-inline-start: 13em;"> down whizzing</span><br />
Zodiacs, dashed<br />
<span class="mw-poem-indented" style="display: inline-block; margin-inline-start: 7em;"> (now nearing fast the Cape!)</span><br />
<span class="mw-poem-indented" style="display: inline-block; margin-inline-start: 15em;"> down gravitation's</span><br />
<span class="mw-poem-indented" style="display: inline-block; margin-inline-start: 17em;"> vortex into crashed</span><br />
...dispersion...into mashed and shapeless débris....<br />
By Hatteras bunched the beached heap of high bravery!
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<div class="poem">
<p>Stars scribble on our eyes the frosty sagas,<br />
The gleaming cantos of unvanquished space...<br />
O sinewy silver biplane, nudging the wind's withers!<br />
There, from Kill Devils Hill at Kitty Hawk<br />
Two brothers in their twinship left the dune;<br />
Warping the gale, the Wright windwrestlers veered<br />
Capeward, then blading the wind's flank, banked and spun<br />
What ciphers risen from prophetic script,<br />
What marathons new-set between the stars!<br />
The soul, by naphtha fledged into new reaches<br />
Already knows the closer clasp of Mars,—<br />
New latitudes, unknotting, soon give place<br />
To what fierce schedules, rife of doom apace!
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<div class="poem">
<p>Wheeled swiftly, wings emerge from larval-silver hangars.<br />
Taut motors surge, space-gnawing, into flight;<br />
Through sparkling visibility, outspread, unsleeping,<br />
Wings clip the last peripheries of light...<br />
Tellurian wind-sleuths on dawn patrol,<br />
Each plane a hurtling javelin of winged ordnance,<br />
Bristle the heights above a screeching gale to hover;<br />
Surely no eye that Sunward Escadrille can cover!<br />
There, meaningful, fledged as the Pleiades<br />
With razor sheen they zoom each rapid helix!<br />
Up-chartered choristers of their own speeding<br />
They, cavalcade on escapade, shear Cumulus—<br />
Lay siege and hurdle Cirrus down the skies!<br />
While Cetus-like, O thou Dirigible, enormous Lounger<br />
Of pendulous auroral beaches,—satellited wide<br />
By convoy planes, moonferrets that rejoin thee<br />
On fleeing balconies as thou dost glide,<br />
—Hast splintered space!
</p>
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<div class="poem">
<p>Or can’t you quite make up your mind to ride;<br />
A walk is better underneath the L a brisk<br />
Ten blocks or so before? But you find yourself<br />
Preparing penguin flexions of the arms,—<br />
As usual you will meet the scuttle yawn:<br />
The subway yawns the quickest promise home.
</p>
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<div class="poem">
<p>Be minimum, then, to swim the hiving swarms<br />
Out of the Square, the Circle burning bright—<br />
Avoid the glass doors gyring at your right,<br />
Where boxed alone a second, eyes take fright<br />
—Quite unprepared rush naked back to light:<br />
And down beside the turnstile press the coin<br />
Into the slot. The gongs already rattle.
</p>
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<div class="poem">
<p>Whose head is swinging from the swollen strap?<br />
Whose body smokes along the bitten rails,<br />
Bursts from a smoldering bundle far behind<br />
In back forks of the chasms of the brain,—<br />
Puffs from a riven stump far out behind<br />
In interborough fissures of the mind...?
</p>
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<div class="poem">
<p>“Let’s have a pencil Jimmy—living now<br />
at Floral Park<br />
Flatbush—on the Fourth of July—<br />
like a pigeon’s muddy dream—potatoes<br />
to dig in the field—travlin the town—too—<br />
night after night—the Culver line—the<br />
girls all shaping up—it used to be—”
</p>
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<div class="poem">
<p>“But I want service in this office SERVICE<br />
I said—after<br />
the show she cried a little afterwards but—”
</p>
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<div class="poem">
<p>Kiss of our agony Thou gatherest,<br />
<span class="mw-poem-indented" style="display: inline-block; margin-inline-start: 9em;"> O Hand of Fire</span><br />
<span class="mw-poem-indented" style="display: inline-block; margin-inline-start: 13em;"> gatherest—</span>
</p>
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<div class="poem">
<p>The intent escalator lifts a serenade<br />
Stilly<br />
Of shoes, umbrellas, each eye attending its shoe, then<br />
Bolting outright somewhere above where streets<br />
Burst suddenly in rain.... The gongs recur:<br />
Elbows and levers, guard and hissing door.<br />
Thunder is galvothermic here below.... The car<br />
Wheels off. The train rounds, bending to a scream,<br />
Taking the final level for the dive<br />
Under the river—<br />
And somewhat emptier than before,<br />
Demented, for a hitching second, humps; then<br />
Lets go.... Toward corners of the floor<br />
Newspapers wing, revolve and wing.<br />
Blank windows gargle signals through the roar.
</p>
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<div class="poem">
<p><span class="mw-poem-indented" style="display: inline-block; margin-inline-start: 3em;"> And so</span><br />
<span class="mw-poem-indented" style="display: inline-block; margin-inline-start: 3em;"> of cities you bespeak</span><br />
<span class="mw-poem-indented" style="display: inline-block; margin-inline-start: 3em;"> subways, rivered under streets</span><br />
<span class="mw-poem-indented" style="display: inline-block; margin-inline-start: 3em;"> and rivers.... In the car</span><br />
<span class="mw-poem-indented" style="display: inline-block; margin-inline-start: 3em;"> the overtone of motion</span><br />
<span class="mw-poem-indented" style="display: inline-block; margin-inline-start: 3em;"> underground, the monotone</span><br />
<span class="mw-poem-indented" style="display: inline-block; margin-inline-start: 3em;"> of motion is the sound</span><br />
<span class="mw-poem-indented" style="display: inline-block; margin-inline-start: 3em;"> of other faces, also underground—</span>
</p>
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<div class="poem">
<p>Daemon, demurring and eventful yawn!<br />
Whose hideous laughter is a bellows mirth<br />
—Or the muffled slaughter of a day in birth—<br />
O cruelly to inoculate the brinking dawn<br />
With antennae toward worlds that glow and sink;—<br />
To spoon us out more liquid than the dim<br />
Locution of the eldest star, and pack<br />
The conscience navelled in the plunging wind,<br />
Umbilical to call—and straightway die!
</p>
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<div class="poem">
<p>And does the Daemon take you home, also,<br />
Wop washerwoman, with the bandaged hair?<br />
After the corridors are swept, the cuspidors—<br />
The gaunt sky-barracks cleanly now, and bare,<br />
O Genoese, do you bring mother eyes and hands<br />
Back home to children and to golden hair?
</p>
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<div class="poem">
<p>The phonographs of hades in the brain<br />
Are tunnels that re-wind themselves, and love<br />
A burnt match skating in a urinal—<br />
Somewhere above Fourteenth TAKE THE EXPRESS<br />
To brush some new presentiment of pain—
</p>
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<div class="poem">
<p>A tugboat, wheezing wreaths of steam,<br />
Lunged past, with one galvanic blare stove up the River.<br />
I counted the echoes assembling, one after one,<br />
Searching, thumbing the midnight on the piers.<br />
Lights, coasting, left the oily tympanum of waters;<br />
The blackness somewhere gouged glass on a sky.<br />
And this thy harbor, O my City, I have driven under,<br />
Tossed from the coil of ticking towers.... Tomorrow,<br />
And to be.... Hereby the River that is East—<br />
Here at the waters’ edge the hands drop memory;<br />
Shadowless in that abyss they unaccounting lie.<br />
How far away the star has pooled the sea—<br />
Or shall the hands be drawn away, to die?
</p>
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<div class="poem">
<p><span class="mw-poem-indented" style="display: inline-block; margin-inline-start: 10em;">*</span>
</p>
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<div class="poem">
<p>Performances, assortments, résumés—<br />
Up Times Square to Columbus Circle lights<br />
Channel the congresses, nightly sessions,<br />
Refractions of the thousand theatres, faces—<br />
Mysterious kitchens.... You shall search them all.<br />
Some day by heart you’ll learn each famous sight<br />
And watch the curtain lift in hell’s despite;<br />
You’ll find the garden in the third act dead,<br />
Finger your knees—and wish yourself in bed<br />
With tabloid crime-sheets perched in easy sight.
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