Tea at the Palaz of Hoon

Tea at the Palaz of Hoon

Not less because in purple I descended
The western day through what you called
The loneliest air, not less was I myself.

What was the ointment sprinkled on my beard?
What were the hymns that buzzed beside my ears?
What was the sea whose tide swept through me there?

Out of my mind the golden ointment rained,
And my ears made the blowing hymns they heard.
I was myself the compass of that sea:

I was the world in which I walked, and what I saw
Or heard or felt came not but from myself;
And there I found myself more truly and more strange.

In the far South the sun of autumn is passing
Like Walt Whitman walking along a ruddy shore.
He is singing and chanting the things that are part of him.

The worlds that were and will be, death and day.
Nothing is final, he chants. No man shall see the end.
His beard is of fire and his staff a leaping flame.

The World As Meditation

           It is Ulysses that approaches from the east,
         The interminable adventurer? The trees are mended.
         That winter is washed away. Someone is moving
       
         On the horizon and lifting himself up above it.
         A form of fire approaches the cretonnes of Penelope,
         Whose mere savage presence awakens the world in which she dwells.
       
         She has composed, so long, a self with which to welcome him,
         Companion to his self for her, which she imagined,
         Two in a deep-founded sheltering, friend and dear friend.
       
         The trees had been mended, as an essential exercise
         In an inhuman meditation, larger than her own.
         No winds like dogs watched over her at night.
       
         She wanted nothing he could not bring her by coming alone.
         She wanted no fetchings. His arms would be her necklace
         And her belt, the final fortune of their desire.
       
         But was it Ulysses? Or was it only the warmth of the sun
         On her pillow? The thought kept beating in her like her heart.
         The two kept beating together. It was only day.
       
         It was Ulysses and it was not. Yet they had met,
         Friend and dear friend and a planet's encouragement.
         The barbarous strength within her would never fail.
       
         She would talk a little to herself as she combed her hair,
         Repeating his name with its patient syllables,
         Never forgetting him that kept coming constantly so near.