Logic and sermons never convince,
The damp of the night drives deeper into my soul.

(Only what proves itself to every man and woman is so,
Only what nobody denies is so.)

A minute and a drop of me settle my brain,
I believe the soggy clods shall become lovers and lamps,
And a compend of compends is the meat of a man or woman,
And a summit and flower there is the feeling they have for each other,
And they are to branch boundlessly out of that lesson until it
becomes omnific,
And until one and all shall delight us, and we them.

              1903


Before a midnight breaks in storm,
  Or herded sea in wrath,         
Ye know what wavering gusts inform 
  The greater tempest's path;
    Till the loosed wind
    Drive all from mind,
Except Distress, which, so will prophets cry,    
O'ercame them, houseless, from the unhinting sky.
                                  
Ere rivers league against the land              
  In piratry of flood,                                 
Ye know what waters steal and stand
  Where seldom water stood.                  
   Yet who will note,                        
   Till fields afloat,                              
And washen carcass and the returning well,
Trumpet what these poor heralds strove to tell? 
                                                
Ye know who use the Crystal Ball                
  (To peer by stealth on Doom),          
The Shade that, shaping first of all,        
  Prepares an empty room.                
    Then doth It pass                     
    Like breath from glass,
But, on the extorted Vision bowed intent, 
No man considers why It came or went.
                                    
Before the years reborn behold            
  Themselves with stranger eye,   
And the sport-making Gods of old,
  Like Samson slaying, die,                         
    Many shall hear                 
    The all-pregnant sphere,                        
Bow to the birth and sweat, but--speech denied-- 
Sit dumb or--dealt in part--fall weak and wide.     
                                                     
Yet instant to fore-shadowed need
  The eternal balance swings;
That winged men, the Fates may breed
  So soon as Fate hath wings.
    These shall possess
    Our littleness,
And in the imperial task (as worthy) lay
Up our lives' all to piece one giant Day.

Dream

Al Saddiq al Raddi, from the "Weaving a World"

Close Up

Another Time

An Image

From the dark spaces of memory
I emerged, rising through a pinprick of light
in the gloom, on all sides the falling
bodies of dead song-birds: these trees
that cast no shadow on their own reflections - I
fashioned them, forging, hammering, working the metal.
And so I found myself, in the wind, fully fledged…
Who
will keep clear a road for me, care
about the solitary journey
I make, torch in hand, in search of home,
or stride towards this body when it's
blackening in the blazing desert heat?

piles up on a cart or in the street
It winds you
Your glass becomes a weapon

Enduring your dream
you hesitate
between a horse and desire
Plunged into lethargy
you wager fire in the streets

Absolute time: your past -
from the square to the prison
salted with bitterness and doubt

Aloft
as though lifted on fingertips -
and yet waves have no fingers
Her desire
structures the water -
and yet waves have no structure

In the split second
between crest and collapse
the world is created
and the world is annulled
without end

A Ballade of Suicide

The gallows in my garden, people say,

Is new and neat and adequately tall;

I tie the noose on in a knowing way

As one that knots his necktie for a ball;
But just as all the neighbours–on the wall–

Are drawing a long breath to shout “Hurray!”

The strangest whim has seized me. . . . After all

I think I will not hang myself to-day.

My uncle’s sword is hanging in the hall–

Perhaps the rector’s mother will not call– I fancy that I heard from Mr. Gall

I never read the works of Juvenal–

The decadents decay; the pedants pall;

And Bernard Shaw discovered that they squall,
Rationalists are growing rational–

So secret that the very sky seems small–

Prince, I can hear the trumpet of Germinal,

The tumbrils toiling up the terrible way;

Even to-day your royal head may fall,

I think I will not hang myself to-day.

Fluttering like a stolen shirt
And I am in your hands
A painting not yet completed
The artist died on his way to me

After all these years
I grow like grass following a storm

I am the grapes of fault
And you the vine
We haven't pressed enough to last the night
The night that forgot to close its eyes
The hanging lamps swing against the dark
And the knot that binds us is an ancient tree
We warm ourselves with its wood
I see the scars of my voice on your back
And darkness surrounds us like a white eagle
who left an egg on my windowsill

Like a clock hung on the horizon
When I looked at you
I understood how late it was
And when I wet my finger the first time
In your navel
My head turned a full circle
You were my neck

My fingers made kites
I blew on my hands
And the wind was blown
I hunt the Cork Oak
Through the sea of nights
I have been drinking a long time
No one came after me
Except afloat

Choose winter
And the rain is on me
Pour me a glass
And purse your lips
We almost got drunk
The night is before us
Many paint the morning
On our backs
Too meagre for two bodies

I am the grapes of fault
And you fill me as blood fills 
A fresh wound
The mirror is behind you
As you comb your hair
In the white of my eyes