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Allen Tate - The Progress Of ŒniaAllen Tate - The Progress Of Œnia
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His dim, ut fama est, vitiis ad proelia ventum est, his Troiana vides funera principiis. PROPERTIUS. I.  MADRIGALE Seed in your heart, warm dust transmuted Gold, blooms in flakes of radiance Arched in your face whereon my days, Brinks of silence, glance. Dream-emptied by some shifting Monna Bice, you I resume: Continually suffer the habitual Cobra of my slightest gloom! Release the happy hounds that trace New smiles from the scampering wood Of winter laughters-new prints of light And trace them to your face! II. IN WINTERTIME I would not give the winter for a rose. For remembering gold meadows and the hummer Sucking them, I think June a time of pillage. Your mouth is more passionate than any summer. They say the spring holds many grapes And green promises of fruit in the summer. Give me your lips, Œnia, and let winter seas Lash the cliffs and snows bite the grape. We shall have passion without the sound of bees. III. VIGIL When you are dead and the frosty iron of laughter Stupendously settles its pride upon your lips, I will gather up the whispers you came after When we first met, of immutable dissimulation. If you are dead when the wind cries again Over the bleak gables of an expected hour, I will build a chapel out of the astonished pain And wait for bells ringing in an empty tower. IV. DIVAGATION How many winds forget the sea! Your dubious intention I forget And look into the eager waste Of your eyes careless of yesterday. What cruel wine, what wayward gust Tattering sun-hair to shreds of rain, Swept you an exile to Gyrene Blown by the swollen winds of pain, I do not know, for we are dead: Cluttering our youthful peace With a various insolence, you laugh The year, avid of love, to grief! Our death, that was lonely, you`ve forgot; Dawn came to us impatiently Then went away with an equal fire, Yet in an instant, in lifted night, This desolation is alive With backward motions of bright feet- Remembering the madness of scaling A certain dusk to the first small star. V. EPILOGUE TO ŒNIA Whatever I have said to praise Your wrath for me in better days Than these, when the toughening grass Fell tenderer for you to pass, I say again, but differently- As a still wind in a winter tree. Pardon me! if turning over In the reminiscence of a lover The leaves of a desiccate romance, I can but wonder if a chance Invasion of a handsomer look Than mine began you another book? I shan`t devise the same end For other books unless you send Me word demanding back your hair. Do you remember how your hair Contained both ears? It never hid Them quite, but climbed to a pyramid More dazzling than superstitious kings Set in the sand as their playthings; And tell me, was it wantonness Fluttering a diaphanous dress That night at the Club when polite backs Jazzed to the midnight cordax And my veins raced to Seboim: Not wantonness, but you were slim, My dear, with a gift that I admired For always being somehow tired! Whatever else I say, your breast Contained the witchery of the rest Of a body vanished into a thought If touched too late, or lately caught. So more than your hair or olive eye I remember your breast-does it still lie Tactual billows in an upper world Of superior sculpture, whence you hurled Volcanic innocence and death Out of the caverns beneath breath? Œnia! forgive these sentiments Of a respectful lover shattered in sense- Yet sad that the modern bawd, grown dim, Obscures the hotel cherubim Whose red neckties had honored this page In a hotter, less barbaric age; For now the languid stertorous Pale verses of Propertius And the sapphire corpse undressed by Donne (Prefiguring Rimbaud`s etymon) Have shrunk to an apotheosis Of cold daylight after the kiss. And since helmets of steel bone rind The great heads of the Numerous Mind No glories of your breast and thighs Shall these poor verses advertise- Only the dry debility Of a spent wind in a winter tree.
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