Download rtf - Tripod

CHOCORUA TO ITS NEIGHBOR
I
To speak quietly at such a distance, to speak
And to be heard is to be large in space,
That, like your own, is large, hence, to be part
Of sky, of sea, large earth, large air. It is
To perceive men without reference to their form.
II
The armies are forms in number, as cities are.
The armies are cities in movement. But a war
Between cities is a gesticulation of forms,
A Swarming of number over number, not
One foot approaching, one uplifted arm.
III
At the end of night last night a crystal star,
The crystal-pointed star of morning, rose
And lit the snow to a light congenial
To this prodigious shadow, who then came
In an elemental freedom, sharp and cold.
IV
The feeling of him was the feel of day,
And of a day as yet unseen, in which
To see was to be. He was the figure in
A poem for Liadoff, the self of selves:
To think of him destroyed the body's form.
V
He was a shell of dark blue glass, or ice,
Or air collected in a deep essay,
Or light embodied, or almost, a flash
On more than muscular shoulders, arms and chest,
Blue's last transparence as it turned to black,
VI
The glitter of a being, which the eye
Accepted yet which nothing understood,
A fusion of night, its blue of the pole of blue
And of the brooding mind, fixed but for a slight
Illumination of movement as he breathed.
VII
He was as tall as a tree in the middle of
The night. The substance of his body seemed
Both substance and non-substance, luminous flesh
Or shapely fire: fire from an underworld,
Of less degree than flame and lesser shine.
VIII
Upon my top he breathed the pointed dark.
He was not man yet he was nothing else.
If in the mind, he vanished, taking there
The mind's own limits, like a tragic thing
Without existence, existing everywhere.
IX
He breathed in crystal-pointed change the whole
Experience of night, as if he breathed
A consciousness from solitude, inhaled
A freedom out of silver-shaping size,
Against the whole experience of day.
X
The silver-shapeless, gold-encrusted size
Of daylight came while he sat thinking. He said,
"The moments of enlargement overlook
The enlarging of the simplest soldier's cry
In what I am, as he falls. Of what I am,
XI
The cry is part. My solitaria
Are the meditations of a central mind.
I hear the motions of the spirit and the sound
Of what is secret becomes, for me, a voice
That is my own voice speaking in my ear.
XII
There lies the misery, the coldest coil
That grips the centre, the actual bite, that life
Itself is like a poverty in the space of life,
So that the flapping of wind around me here
Is something in tatters that I cannot hold.''
XIII
In spite of this, the gigantic bulk of him
Grew strong, as if doubt never touched his heart.
Of what was this the force? From what desire
And from what thinking did his radiance come?
In what new spirit had his body birth?
XIV
He was more than an external majesty,
Beyond the sleep of those that did not know,
More than a spokesman of the night to say
Now, time stands still. He came from out of sleep.
He rose because men wanted him to be.
XV
They wanted him by day to be, image,
But not the person, of their power, thought,
But not the thinker, large in their largeness, beyond
Their form, beyond their life, yet of themselves,
Excluding by his largeness their defaults.
XVI
Last night at the end of night his starry head,
Like the head of fate, looked out in darkness, part
Thereof and part desire and part the sense
Of what men are. The collective being knew
There were others like him safely under roof :
XVII
The captain squalid on his pillow, the great
Cardinal, saying the prayers of earliest day;
The stone, the categorical effigy;
And thc mother, the music, the name; the scholar,
Whose green mind bulges with complicated hues:
XVIII
True transfigurers fetched out of the human mountain,
True genii for the diminished, spheres,
Gigantic embryos of populations,
Blue friends in shadows, rich conspirators,
Confiders and comforters and lofty kin.
XIX
To say more than human things with human voice,
That cannot be; to say human things with more
Than human voice, that, also, cannot be;
To speak humanly from the height or from the depth
Of human things, that is acutest speech.
XX
Now, I, Chocorua, speak of this shadow as
A human thing. It is an eminence,
But of nothing, trash of sleep that will disappear
With the special things of night, little by little,
In day's constellation, and yet remain, yet be,
XXI
Not father, but bare brother, megalfrere,
Or by whatever boorish name a man
Might call the common self, interior fons.
And fond, the total man of glubbal glub,
Political tramp with an heraldic air,
XXII
Cloud-casual, metaphysical metaphor,
But resting on me, thinking in my snow,
Physical if the eye is quick enough,
So that, where he was, there is an enkindling, where
He is, the air changes and grows fresh to breathe.
XXIII
The air changes, creates and re-creates, like strength,
And to breathe is a fulfilling of desire,
A clearing, a detecting, a completing,
A largeness lived and not conceived, a space
That is an instant nature, brilliantly.
XXIV
Integration for integration, the great arms
Of the armies, the solid men, make big the fable.
This is their captain and philosopher,
He that is fortelleze, though he be
Hard to perceive and harder still to touch.
XXV
Last night at the end of night and in the sky,
The lesser night, the less than morning light,
Fell on him, high and cold, searching for what
Was native to him in that height, searching
The pleasure of his spirit in the cold.
XVI
How singular he was as man, how large,
If nothing more than that, for the moment, large
In my presence, the companion of presences
Greater than mine, of his demanding, head
And, of human realizings, rugged roy . . .