The Ultimate Vampire Resource and Directory

Day 3

8:16 am



First Movement



The women bow and flutter in the field.

The grain lies white with wind in the wide shadow.

Summer is dark, as in the ancient time.



This fair cloud that blooms in the northwest

Has darkened now, as in the ancient time,

And clouds are still at dawn on the soft mountains.



Husks after harvest we shall leave for rain

And our heels’ trace in the loam:

The stir of boughs has warned us,

Fruit in the grass reminds us . . .



I. We made this journey not in desire

But thirst. When we entered the towns

In the smoky light, the whistles, and the lanterns

Swinging or still beside the shunted cars,

It was not love we took to brood upon.

There were foes in our legends, whom alone

We fought, breath vowed to their meaning.

By various paths and twilights, corners of rain,

Watching the children play, lamplighters come,

We stayed to hear their dangerous low voices.



Saying when the wind had fallen: Sorrow.

Eyes are filled with death. The rooms are

Hives of evil. Dustclouds on the road

Follow the traveler like a malediction.

By night the leaves are years

And distant each one in that silvered dark.

Or marvels stretched there in the stillness:

Gleam of the wolf among the alders, beasts

Fawning on stairhead, door-whine in the night,

Or mothers risen infamous from the grave.



And one would come in sleep, which was the vampire

In under light, boundless, whose near brow

Turned the glad fiend’s with sudden clasp or sigh;

And others in that slow time beyond terror—

Madmen in armies trampling the vast brain,

Gnashing as engines quietly, or cold

In the void ether, visions

Famished through interminable dark,

Which wakened us our bodies, the strange bones

Trembling in single wonder of themselves.





II. And in the sun where we were friends and strangers,

Kicking tough oars together clean of the foam,

We knew we were alone upon that water;

Or on long fields in a leaf-blowing autumn,

Handling the hard ball backward through the sunlight,

Lonely under the high kick, toward the tackle

Thrown and the curt cleats taking us and down, the

Bitter turf our vision, so alone there

Waiting for pain in the numb fracture, listened.



Handshake and smiling, or the rainy crowds

In cities glistening with the tick of cabs,

Or sunlight crossing the loud corners, left us

Always to question a still room ourselves:

When winter lifted her cool beams

Dawnwide and whitened in the ache of light,

The grey mask on the pillow turned, death issued

Pure from our lips as from a studying child,

Till waking tendons netted us alive.



Head reared into the morning.



And in cold mirrors our deep eyes,

Familiars of starlight, curious

Interpreters of the sun, the fire and clear

Waterlights of noon upon our walls:

Webs for the spring of shadow.

Where have you been?

What have you noticed? What have you hidden? Who

Speaks to you in this one’s voice? Still there?

So hurt, so sorry, so angry, so ashamed . . .





III. Girls came with their wide eyes, the faint flames

Branching about them, and their flowerlike hair:

Avid, delicate harlots: those pale ones

Received us in stately dream, in daylight were

Beloved, their warm breasts and beautiful shoulders

Sweet comforts which the lutanist sang of old.

A long walk after. The fat bawds of smoke

Impaled on phalloi in a pantomime

Wriggled a squealing answer to our love.



And hatred rotting with pity in our houses

Filmed, a thin gum for eyelids over midnight.

We sat on our two bones and we were blind.

Unless a far light, home light, the old vision,

Land of children, loveliest in the west,

Glowed in the time-drift

Small as a minuet-whisper and as dear.

And our hearts faint with grief to think of it:

How crickets dinned in the sure evening, late

Locusts would come, each to his ancient tree;

Mowers on many lawns, leveling summer,

Measured the slow festival of the air;



Or in bright gusts of winter by the door,

The shadows thin beneath a glitter of icicles,

Our mothers in their ceremonial furs,

Delicious ladies laughing, their cheeks cold—

Gone from the light like their breath’s vapor, leaving

This image or another bound in thought

With scent of old spoons, handkerchiefs and roses.



Time that brought them to their narrow anguish

Removed us from their rooms.





IV. Lamplight and dark,

The many years and splendor. We were those men

Who saw from dunes on the dark ocean,

On windy earth, the wasteful magnificent seasons

Driving their clouds, as planet tilted turning

Radiance toward the poles. Inland were forests

Kept the snow in winter, shade in summer;

Plains were a long gaze and a sigh from hills.



We moved there always in the northern weather,

Briefly together or alone,

Heard the flush of motors, cylinder flutter

Under us, the fiery power sound

Swelling the road backward. Against glass

Wind blustered brightening from the simple farms,

And there were black fields and the plowman, lonely,

Inching through the sunlit treasure of distance,

And starlings rising in stillness on meadowlands.



Or walked upon an aerodrome in our dream

Below the downward hush and remorse of engines,

Their wings sighing home.

Blades chuckered and a harsh roar kicked up dust:

Swung to the wind and traveled. Dreaming we saw

Bright fields and sun, bright garlands flung from struts,

The land tilt in the long air, the shrunken land

Drift down to southward at a cloud’s pace:



And came in a bower of loneliness and cloud,

Riding with dark engines depth of wind,

Where cities smouldering in a nick of rivers shone,

Dud fireworks by their runnels, glittered in mist.

Sea lay, quicksilver, eastward, and a sail

Perched like the white pinch of a butterfly . . .



Over the dials our enormous hands . . .





V. We wakened in the clear light of the mountains,

In white rooms of the valley people, breathing

Under their curtains icy air. We swam

In black streams running with a foam upon them,

Or stood in that high summer with the quiet

Presence of those we loved. In winter, skiing.

Our faint years fell like snow beyond the valleys.

And over them a cross bore blackened Christ

Against the snowfields like a scarecrow.

There

Cars were steaming in that gash of light,

Nose over pass to cloudland and deep plain,

As those of Lombardy or Piedmont, burning

Southward, the low wind in the ilex rustling

Memoried evening and the cypress shades:



Or then by northern rivers under towers

Graven in purest sky, with sometimes bells

Remembered in the nerves of many dead—

In their streets wandered, listening to the flutist who loved

His single note, sweet in the russet shuffle

Of fall, his bound throat bent to the measure,

Or slowly in the evening dust and gold

On grey stones pausing, listened . . . So from the vine,

The window bar and the cold garden eaves,

Haled by a decor of heads turning there:

Such courtesy, not gross enough for time . . .





VI. At night above the embers of those towns

Coiled with thin-running lights and girls’ laughter,

heard sea-music and the slap of seas;

Odysseus, our father, wanderer;

Or Anchises, to whom the Cyprian came,

The figure tall, with cool thighs in the light,

Unkindly glory from the islands,

Linking before her the rich padding cats,

When in her temple the wind lifted

First at twilight round the columns, flowering

Formal leaves yet softer than the loved myrtle

Above the shy sandals, shadowed dance . . .



And in young frosty mornings, breathing down,

We knelt with our wet brows under the flames

That burned nightlong, silent and merciful.

Airs from the fragrant stone, the great cathedral

Organs raging, Holy, Holy, Holy,

And their sad liturgies like incense rising

Far off on a low violet imagined land.



There where small leaves turned grey after the wind,

Dove-bearing, over mild dust we saw them come

Slowly in weariness, his followers,

Walking by Olivet in the moon’s hours:

In their eyes were narratives and wisdom,

Sweetened by an old light in the cedars;

Their polished hands held fast the ancient staves;

They were sere and kind to the children of women;

Their feet were sensible of stones and leaves,

And in evening they could write on the papyrus

Legends of their lord Christ: they were strange men.



And stranger light than theirs, a stranger time,

The child caught in the glass: unhistoried years

When Bluebeard throve, who knew what dainty dread

Would take his milkwhite staring ladies,

Their cold hands timid on the strings—



So hallowed that flood of western air and pale

Where no leaf burned but sundown in his hall,

The sweet world, God’s world, marvelous with fear . . .



VII. And we who dreamed these things came down

Stair after stair, rim within rim of darkness,

To enter in our hunger the hell of cities,

Torn by crowds, their faces blowing skyward

Under the flares and premonition of rifles:

The presses humming on the looms of night,

And news-sheets crumpled, howling in an alley

Of evil rising in the shade of war,

Such evil as in our time lived under us

Dissolving shining things . . . dissolving

The young men on their benches into death.



At length to make our verse for oblivious winter

In the late night of nuns and mounted police,

Old nuns who pray in the cold rooms of the sick

For intercession of Mary at their hour of death,

And the blue riders on their blanketed horses,

Slowly pacing the gutters

stiff in the night wind.