Chapter III

With the impalpable lightness of May breezes
Begins a battle of flower petals:
Cowering in the primrose whirlwind his lips have blown,
The little grotesque with the shattered heart,
Fearful,
Yet sinister in his fearfulness.

THEODORE DREISER

The man body jumbled out of the earth, half formed,
Clay on the feet,
Heavy with the lingering might of chaos.
The man face so high above the feet
As if lonesome for them like a child.
The veins that beat heavily with the music they but half
understood
Coil languidly around the heart
And lave it in the death stream
Of a grand impersonal benignance.

PIETA

The child--
Warm chubby thighs,
Fat brown arms,
An unsurprised face--
Cries for jam.
The mother buys him with jam.

An old woman,
Tottering on lean leather skinned legs,
Sucks with glazing eyes
The crystal silken milk
That flows from the death wound
In a young flower-soft, jewel-soft body.

BRAZIL THROUGH A MIST

THE RANCH

TROPICAL LIFE

White flower,
Your petals float away
But I hardly hear them.

TWENTY-FOUR HOURS

The day is so long and white,
A road all dust,
Smooth monotony;
And the night at the end,
A hill to be climbed,
Slowly, laboriously,
While the stars prick our hands
Like thistles.

RAINY SEASON

A flock of parrakeets
Hurled itself through the mist;
Harsh wild green
And clamor-tongued
Through the dim white forest.
They vanished,
And the lips of Silence
Sucked at the roots of Life.

MAIL ON THE RANCH

The old man on the mule
Opens the worn saddle bags,
And takes out the papers.

From the outer world
The thoughts come stabbing,
To taunt, baffle, and stir me to revolt.
I beat against the sky,
Against the winds of the mountain,
But my cries, grown thin in all this space,
Are diluted with emptiness...
Like the air,
Thin and wide,
Touching everything,
Touching nothing.

THE VAMPIRE BAT

What was it that came out of the night?
What was it that went away in the night?
The little brown hen is huddled in the fence corner,
Eyes already glazing.
How should she know what came out of the night,
Or what was taken away in the night?
A shadow passed across the moon.
The wind rustled in the mango trees.
And now, in the morning,
The little brown hen is huddled in the fence corner,
Eyes already glazing;
Because a shadow passed across the moon,
And the wind rustled in the mango trees.

CONSERVATISM

The turkeys,
Like hoop-skirted old ladies
Out walking,
Display their solemn propriety.

A terrible force,
Hungry and destructive,
Emanates from their mistily blinking eyes.

LITTLE PIGS

Little tail quivering,
Wrinkled snout thrusting up the mud:
He will find God
If he keeps on like that.

THE SILLY EWE

The silly ewe comes smelling up to me.
Her tail wriggles without hinges,
Both ends of it at once and equal.
Yesterday the parrot bit her;
Last week the jaguar ate her young one;
But experience teaches her nothing.

THE SNAKE

The chickens are at home in the barnyard,
The pigs in the swill,
And the flowers in the garden;
But where do you belong,
With your lacquered coils,
O snake?

THE YEAR

Days and days float by.
On the sides of the mountains
Blue shadows shift
And sift into silence.
Morning...
The cock crows.
There is that rosy glow on the mountain's edge;
Jose in the door of his hut;
Maria's lace bobbins
Tapping, tapping.
Evening...
The parrot's shrill cry;
Pale silver green stars.
Night...
The ghosts of dead Joses
And dead Marias
Sitting in the moonlight.
Peace--
Depressing,
Interminable
Peace.

BURNING MOUNTAINS

I

A herder set fire to the grass
On the other side of the valley,
And now a beautiful Indian woman
Bends, whirls, undulates,
Tosses her gold braceleted arms into the air--
Then sinks into her gray veil.