MS Collections

I know that I once heard
A truth so different
That I had no word 
To fold it in with sense

Between two common
Thoughts I saw
My daemon
And another law

I lived under,
And I knew the ruse
When angels surrender
To the flesh they choose

And a Stranger
Shook my tree
To a youngness younger
Than April sets free

In the bright time before
Poetry was accident
I lived.

Not the tragic strings 
Of the inner heart
Will I pull taut
To be played upon by every fool musician
The flimsy-souled centres of piety
Seeking a covering of art.

We have lived too narrowly
And sung to one sense
The lyric
Short and intense

And we have loved
The unfleshed woman
Till God had wished us
A little more human.

I name the plain things
A book a barrow or a horse
The water from the common springs
When I would draw from a deeper source.

The Circle is the Father
Diameter His Son
Spirit the mathematical centre
Thus truth is known
In all turning wheels
In all tumbling clowns
As in the Firmament deeps
Where the Prophet drowns

Blessed are the followers
Of all wheel tracks
Blessed the spoke-tortured
Christ.

Shaking the branches
Of the Tree
For fresh blossoms of language,
Tiredly
Shaking, and ringing the changes
On a one-octave lute,
Begging a new strangeness
Hard urging the brute
Life; praying for
A break:
Eve and a strong Adam taking her,
Marx the State;
A new Genesis in a Russian
Sentiment - 
The Tree breaks, confusion,
Maggots, not blossoms, on the Continent.

You took me to pieces
As a child
An old clock,
When you smiled:

My wheels of mind
And springs of power
The door that had
A painted flower,

Hands and pendulum
And face:
You only left
A doorless case

And when you'd done
My clock this harm
You went and bought
A cheap alarm.

Ten by twelve
And a low roof
If I stand by the side-wall
My head gets the reproof.

As I was turning aside from the struggle
And crying "It cannot be"
One came and spoke to me
Strange lighted words
Like the silence of singing-birds
In a dark tree.

As I was turning from the struggle
One came and spoke to me
Strange lighted words
Like the silence of singing birds
In a dawn-tree
She said to me
'The lonely triumphant have known
No bed-fellow but me
A dream carved in stone'
And then she was gone
Yet I blessed
The bitterness of the struggle that would lay me
On this dream's breast.