Lore of a Billion Trembling Hands

Like a dull scholar, I behold, ancient love

Our bloom is gone, us who hold histories

Against our cheeks, the future fruit

 

What is love to us, figs of the dead?

Romance that turns grotesque by

The vines of time, the brooding of memory

 

I cannot celebrate, what I did not possess

Cupid’s curiosity of well-mannered paladins

The fops of fancy that in my

 

Youthful poems left, turning to mystic sprouts

Of some magic tree, to which knowledge

Cannot catch, those balmy boughs

 

Of the world-soul, silver-ruddy

Against our kissing lips, I’ve kissed the air

Until even the birds sung of my

 

Semblance of the unity of the wind

There is a blue pigeon that circles

The bluest sky, unobserved and all-loving

 

I come from that lordly study

Of the earth, of men, of women.