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<div style="background:#fff;border:#bbb dashed 1px;padding:5px"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=360070" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none"><div style="margin:10px 0"><strong>A Treatise On Poetry: IV Natura</strong></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=360070" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">Pennsylvania, 1948-1949</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=360070" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">The garden of Nature opens. <br>The grass at the threshold is green. <br>And an almond tree begins to bloom. </a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=360070" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">Sunt mihi Dei Acherontis propitii! <br>Valeat numen triplex Jehovae! <br>Ignis, aeris, aquae, terrae spiritus, <br>Salvete!—says the entering guest. </a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=360070" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">Ariel lives in the palace of an apple tree, <br>But will not appear, vibrating like a wasp’s wing, <br>And Mephistopheles, disguised as an abbot <br>Of the Dominicans or the Franciscans, <br>Will not descend from a mulberry bush <br>Onto a pentagram drawn in the black loam of the path. </a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=360070" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none"><br>But a rhododendron walks among the rocks <br>Shod in leathery leaves and ringing a pink bell. <br>A hummingbird, a child’s top in the air, <br>Hovers in one spot, the beating heart of motion. <br>Impaled on the nail of a black thorn, a grasshopper <br>Leaks brown fluid from its twitching snout. <br>And what can he do, the phantom-in-chief, <br>As he’s been called, more than a magician, <br>The Socrates of snails, as he’s been called, <br>Musician of pears, arbiter of orioles, man? <br>In sculptures and canvases our individuality <br>Manages to survive. In Nature it perishes. <br>Let him accompany the coffin of the woodsman <br>Pushed from a cliff by a mountain demon, <br>The he-goat with its jutting curl of horn. <br>Let him visit the graveyard of the whalers <br>Who drove spears into the flesh of leviathan <br>And looked for the secret in guts and blubber. <br>The thrashing subsided, quieted to waves. <br>Let him unroll the textbooks of alchemists <br>Who almost found the cipher, thus the scepter. <br>Then passed away without hands, eyes, or elixir. </a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=360070" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none"><br>Here there is sun. And whoever, as a child, <br>Believed he could break the repeatable pattern <br>Of things, if only he understood the pattern, <br>Is cast down, rots in the skin of others, <br>Looks with wonder at the colors of the butterfly, <br>Inexpressible wonder, formless, hostile to art. </a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=360070" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none"><br>To keep the oars from squeaking in their locks, <br>He binds them with a handkerchief. The dark <br>Had rushed east from the Rocky Mountains <br>And settled in the forests of the continent: <br>Sky full of embers reflected in a cloud, <br>Flight of herons, trees above a marsh, <br>The dry stalks in water, livid, black. My boat <br>Divides the aerial utopias of the mosquitoes <br>Which rebuild their glowing castles instantly. <br>A water lily sinks, fizzing, under the boat’s bow. </a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=360070" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none"><br>Now it is night only. The water is ash-gray. <br>Play, music, but inaudibly! I wait an hour <br>In the silence, senses tuned to a beaver’s lodge. <br>Then suddenly, a crease in the water, a beast’s <br>black moon, rounded, ploughing up quickly <br>from the pond-dark, from the bubbling methanes. <br>I am not immaterial and never will be. <br>My scent in the air, my animal smell, <br>Spreads, rainbow-like, scares the beaver: <br>A sudden splat. <br>I remained where I was <br>In the high, soft coffer of the night’s velvet, <br>Mastering what had come to my senses: <br>How the four-toed paws worked, how the hair <br>Shook off water in the muddy tunnel. <br>It does not know time, hasn’t heard of death, <br>Is submitted to me because I know I’ll die. </a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=360070" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none"><br>I remember everything. That wedding in Basel, <br>A touch to the strings of a viola and fruit <br>In silver bowls. As was the custom in Savoy, <br>An overturned cup for three pairs of lips, <br>And the wine spilled. The flames of the candles <br>Wavery and frail in a breeze from the Rhine. <br>Her fingers, bones shining through the skin, <br>Felt out the hooks and clasps of the silk <br>And the dress opened like a nutshell, <br>Fell from the turned graininess of the belly. <br>A chain for the neck rustled without epoch, <br>In pits where the arms of various creeds <br>Mingle with bird cries and the red hair of caesars. </a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=360070" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none"><br>Perhaps this is only my own love speaking <br>Beyond the seventh river. Grit of subjectivity, <br>Obsession, bar the way to it. <br>Until a window shutter, dogs in the cold garden, <br>The whistle of a train, an owl in the firs <br>Are spared the distortions of memory. <br>And the grass says: how it was I don’t know. </a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=360070" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none"><br>Splash of a beaver in the American night. <br>The memory grows larger than my life. <br>A tin plate, dropped on the irregular red bricks <br>Of a floor, rattles tinnily forever. <br>Belinda of the big foot, Julia, Thaïs, <br>The tufts of their sex shadowed by ribbon. </a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=360070" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none"><br>Peace to the princesses under the tamarisks. <br>Desert winds beat against their painted eyelids. <br>Before the body was wrapped in bandelettes, <br>Before wheat fell asleep in the tomb, <br>Before stone fell silent, and there was only pity. </a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=360070" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none"><br>Yesterday a snake crossed the road at dusk. <br>Crushed by a tire, it writhed on the asphalt. <br>We are both the snake and the wheel. <br>There are two dimensions. Here is the unattainable <br>Truth of being, here, at the edge of lasting <br>and not lasting. Where the parallel lines intersect, <br>Time lifted above time by time. </a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=360070" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none"><br>Before the butterfly and its color, he, numb, <br>Formless, feels his fear, he, unattainable. <br>For what is a butterfly without Julia and Thaïs? <br>And what is Julia without a butterfly’s down <br>In her eyes, her hair, the smooth grain of her belly? <br>The kingdom, you say. We do not belong to it, <br>And still, in the same instant, we belong. <br>For how long will a nonsensical Poland <br>Where poets write of their emotions as if <br>They had a contract of limited liability <br>Suffice? I want not poetry, but a new diction, <br>Because only it might allow us to express <br>A new tenderness and save us from a law <br>That is not our law, from necessity <br>Which is not ours, even if we take its name. </a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=360070" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none"><br>From broken armor, from eyes stricken <br>By the command of time and taken back <br>Into the jurisdiction of mold and fermentation, <br>We draw our hope. Yes, to gather in an image <br>The furriness of the beaver, the smell of rushes, <br>And the wrinkles of a hand holding a pitcher <br>From which wine trickles. Why cry out <br>That a sense of history destroys our substance <br>If it, precisely, is offered to our powers, <br>A muse of our gray-haired father, Herodotus, <br>As our arm and our instrument, though <br>It is not easy to use it, to strengthen it <br>So that, like a plumb with a pure gold center, <br>It will serve again to rescue human beings. </a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=360070" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none"><br>With such reflections I pushed a rowboat, <br>In the middle of the continent, through tangled stalks, <br>In my mind an image of the waves of two oceans <br>And the slow rocking of a guard-ship’s lantern. <br>Aware that at this moment I—and not only I— <br>Keep, as in a seed, the unnamed future. <br>And then a rhythmic appeal composed itself, <br>Alien to the moth with its whirring of silk: </a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=360070" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none"><br>O City, O Society, O Capital, <br>We have seen your steaming entrails. <br>You will no longer be what you have been. <br>Your songs no longer gratify our hearts. </a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=360070" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none"><br>Steel, cement, lime, law, ordinance, <br>We have worshipped you too long, <br>You were for us a goal and a defense, <br>Ours was your glory and your shame. </a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=360070" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none"><br>And where was the covenant broken? <br>Was it in the fires of war, the incandescent sky? <br>Or at twilight, as the towers fly past, when one looked <br>From the train across a desert of tracks </a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=360070" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">To a window out past the maneuvering locomotives <br>Where a girl examines her narrow, moody face <br>In a mirror and ties a ribbon to her hair <br>Pierced by the sparks of curling papers? </a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=360070" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none"><br>Those walls of yours are shadows of walls, <br>And your light disappeared forever. <br>Not the world's monument anymore, an oeuvre of your own <br>Stands beneath the sun in an altered space. </a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=360070" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none"><br>From stucco and mirrors, glass and paintings, <br>Tearing aside curtains of silver and cotton, <br>Comes man, naked and mortal, <br>Ready for truth, for speech, for wings. </a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=360070" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none"><br>Lament, Republic! Fall to your knees! <br>The loudspeaker’s spell is discontinued. <br>Listen! You can hear the clocks ticking. <br>Your death approaches by his hand. </a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=360070" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none"><br>An oar over my shoulder, I walked from the woods. <br>A porcupine scolded from the fork of a tree, <br>A horned owl, not changed by the century, <br>Not changed by place or time, looked down. <br>Bubo maximus, from the work of Linnaeus. </a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=360070" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none"><br>America for me has the pelt of a raccoon, <br>Its eyes are a raccoon’s black binoculars. <br>A chipmunk flickers in a litter of dry bark <br>Where ivy and vines tangle in the red soil <br>At the roots of an arcade of tulip trees. <br>America’s wings are the color of a cardinal, <br>Its beak is half-open and a mockingbird trills <br>From a leafy bush in the sweat-bath of the air. <br>Its line is the wavy body of a water moccasin <br>Crossing a river with a grass-like motion, <br>A rattlesnake, a rubble of dots and speckles, <br>Coiling under the bloom of a yucca plant. </a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=360070" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none"><br>America is for me the illustrated version <br>Of childhood tales about the heart of tanglewood, <br>Told in the evening to the spinning wheel’s hum. <br>And a violin, shivvying up a square dance, <br>Plays the fiddles of Lithuania or Flanders. <br>My dancing partner’s name is Birute Swenson. <br>She married a Swede, but was born in Kaunas. <br>Then from the night window a moth flies in <br>As big as the joined palms of the hands, <br>With a hue like the transparency of emeralds. </a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=360070" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none"><br>Why not establish a home in the neon heat <br>Of Nature? Is it not enough, the labor of autumn, <br>Of winter and spring and withering summer? <br>You will hear not one word spoken of the court <br>of Sigismund Augustus on the banks of the Delaware River. <br>The Dismissal of the Greek Envoys is not needed. <br>Herodotus will repose on his shelf, uncut. <br>And the rose only, a sexual symbol, <br>Symbol of love and superterrestrial beauty, <br>Will open a chasm deeper than your knowledge. <br>About it we find a song in a dream: </a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=360070" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none"><br>Inside the rose <br>Are houses of gold, <br>black isobars, streams of cold. <br>Dawn touches her finger to the edge of the Alps <br>And evening streams down to the bays of the sea. </a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=360070" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none"><br>If anyone dies inside the rose, <br>They carry him down the purple-red road <br>In a procession of clocks all wrapped in folds. <br>They light up the petals of grottoes with torches. <br>They bury him there where color begins, <br>At the source of the sighing, <br>Inside the rose. </a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=360070" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none"><br>Let names of months mean only what they mean. <br>Let the Aurora’s cannons be heard in none <br>Of them, or the tread of young rebels marching. <br>We might, at best, keep some kind of souvenir, <br>Preserved like a fan in a garret. Why not <br>Sit down at a rough country table and compose <br>An ode in the old manner, as in the old times <br>Chasing a beetle with the nib of our pen?</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><br /></a><a href="http://poems.citatepedia.com/">poem</a> by <strong><a rel="author" href="http://authors.citatepedia.com/by.php?a=Czeslaw+Milosz">Czeslaw Milosz</a></strong></div>