1
The particular thing, whether it be four pinches of four divers white
powders cleverly compounded to cure surely, safely, pleasantly a painful
twitching of the eyelids or say a pencil sharpened at one end, dwarfs
the imagination, makes logic a butterfly, offers a finality that sends
us spinning through space, a fixity the mind could climb forever, a
revolving mountain, a complexity with a surface of glass: the gist of
poetry. _D. C. al fin._
2
There is no thing that with a twist of the imagination cannot be
something else. Porpoises risen in a green sea, the wind at nightfall
bending the rose-red grasses and you—in your apron running to catch—say
it seems to you to be your son. How ridiculous! You will pass up into
a cloud and look back at me, not count the scribbling foolish that put
wings to your heels, at your knees.
3
Sooner or later as with the leaves forgotten the swinging branch
long since and summer: they scurry before a wind on the frost-baked
ground—have no place to rest—somehow invoke a burst of warm days not of
the past nothing decayed: crisp summer!—neither a copse for resurrected
frost eaters but a summer removed undestroyed a summer of dried
leaves scurrying with a screech, to and fro in the half dark—twittering,
chattering, scraping. Hagh!
* * * * *
_Seeing the leaves dropping from the high and low branches the thought
rises: this day of all others is the one chosen, all other days fall away
from it on either side and only itself remains in perfect fulness. It
is its own summer, of its leaves as they scrape on the smooth ground it
must build its perfection. The gross summer of the year is only a halting
counterpart of those fiery days of secret triumph which in reality
themselves paint the year as if upon a parchment, giving each season a
mockery of the warmth or frozeness which is within ourselves. The true
seasons blossom or wilt not in fixed order but so that many of them may
pass in a few weeks or hours whereas sometimes a whole life passes and
the season remains of a piece from one end to the other._