English

I

O nash! more blest in ev'ry other thing,
But in thy Poet wretched as a King!
Thy Realm disarm'd of each offensive Tool,
Ah! leave not this, this Weapon to a Fool.
Thy happy Reign all other Discord quells;
Oh doe but silence Cibber, and the Bells.
Apollo's genuine Sons thy fame shall raise
And all Mankind, but Cibber, sing thy praise.

The huge red-buttressed mesa over yonder,
Is merely a far-off temple where the sleepy sun is burning
Its altar-fires of pinyon and of toyon for the day.

The old priests sleep, white-shrouded,
Their pottery whistles lie beside them, the prayer-sticks closely feathered;
On every mummied face there glows a smile.

The sun is rolling slowly
Beneath the sluggish folds of the sky-serpents,
Coiling, uncoiling, blue-black, sparked with fires.

The old dead priests
Feel in the thin dried earth that is heaped about them,

Up and down and up and down,
Through the stony uplands every day,
Where the dark blue peaks dream far away,
Beating my donkey with a stick
I go;
To gather fuel for the town,
Strips of dead greasewood, twisted, grey —

Where on the windblown edge of a cliff
Yellow crumbling walls look far below,
As they did centuries ago;
When the Spaniards in their helmets
With the banner of the cross
Rode along;
There I stop and break my fast.
There dried onions and two pieces of bread,
From a rag tied to my belt,

The windmills, like great sunflowers of steel,
Lift themselves proudly over the straggling houses;
And at their feet the deep blue-green alfalfa
Cuts the desert like the stroke of a sword.

Yellow melon flowers
Crawl beneath the withered peach-trees;
A date-palm throws its heavy fronds of steel
Against the scoured metallic sky.

The houses, double-roofed for coolness,
Cower amid the manzanita scrub.
A man with jingling spurs
Walks heavily out of a vine-bowered doorway,
Mounts his pony, rides away.

The canyon is choked with stones and undergrowth;
The heat that falls from the sky
Beats at the walls, slides, and reverberates
Down in a wave of grey dust and white fire:
Stinging the mouth and eyes.

The ponies struggle and scramble,
Half way up, along the canyon wall;
Their listless riders seldom lift
A weary hand to guide their feet;
Stones are loosened and clatter
Down to the sunbaked depths.

Nothing has ever lived here,
Nothing could ever live here;
Two hawks, screaming and wheeling,

By an alley lined with tumble-down shacks,
And street-lamps askew, half-sputtering,
Feebly glimmering on gutters choked with filth and dogs
Scratching their mangy backs:
Half-naked children are running about,
Women puff cigarettes in black doorways,
Crickets are crying.
Men slouch sullenly
Into the shadows:
Behind a hedge of cactus,
The smell of a dead horse
Mingles with the smell of tortillas frying.
And a girl in a black lace shawl
Sits in a rickety chair by the square of an unglazed window,

By the well in the desert I sat for long,
And watched the magpies, with black-and-white checkered bodies,
Leaping from twig to twig of the greasewood,
To look at the water spilled on the ground
By the herder who went by with three lean cattle,
Climbing out of the blue-and-gold silence of morning.
There was the shadow well with stones piled about it,
The coarse tattered rope, the battered tin bucket
And the nose of my pony cropping thin grass not far off,
The grey sagebrush and silence.
At the horizon
The heat rose and fell,

Largo

In the morning I saw three great ships
Almost motionless
Becalmed on an infinite horizon.

The clatter of waves up the beach,
The grating rush of wet pebbles,
The loud monotonous song of the surf,
All these have soothed me
And have given
My soul to rest.

At noon I shall see waves flashing,
White power of spray.
The steamers, stately,
Kick up white puffs of spray behind them.
The boiling wake
Merges in the blue-black mirror of the sea.

One eye of the sun sees all:

Allegro con fuoco

Crooked, crawling tide with long wet fingers
Clutching at the gritty beach in the roar and spurt of spray,
Tide of gales, drunken tide, lava-burst of breakers,
Black ships plunge upon you from sea to sea away.

Shattering tide, tide of winds, tide of the long still winter,
What matter though ships fail, men sink, there vanish glory?
War-clouds shall hurl their stinging sleet upon our last adventure,
Night-winds shall brokenly whisper our bitter, tragic story.

Grave: triste

Its huge red prow
Uplifted in a tragic attitude,
It waits out there; the seas around
Bubble and hiss with moaning sound:
In sight of port at the gates of the sea,
It waits upreared expectantly.

It has known the joy of battle,
It has known the shock of wreck:
The spray coated its planking,
The sands swallow its deck:
Monument of the sea,
That knows and that forgets eternally.

It heaves its scarred brow towards the city:
The city pays it little heed: