Yellow

Dirty gold sublimed from the black earth up

In bright air: these are the awaited stalks,

The ripeness possible to imagine

Even among mezzotints of winter,

And to remember having imagined

Oddly amid late spring's lackadaisies

And all of the earlier primulas.

Prophetic pale flecks of forsythia

Lemony against the cold engravings

Of gray branches-these whisper of golden

Flashings over the surface of water

Above the attentive images of

Jonquils peering out at themselves along

The wide bank. Which would be no fulfillment

In any event, of early pallor:

It would remain an interpretation

Of the flimsy text, half unremembered,

Dimming evermore and diminishing.

Like gold afire in the yellow candles'

Flame, steady with remembrances and now

And then only wavering in regret,

What might have been burns up and the bright fruit

Of what we after all have ever ripens.

The squinting flames eye each other as fruit

And flame and eye and yellowy flower.

To have been kept, to have reached this season,

Is to have eternized, for a moment,

The time when promise and fulfillment feed

Upon each other, when the living gold

Of sunlight struck from the amazing corn

Seems one with its cold, unending token,

The warm time when both seem reflections from

The bright eyes of the Queen of the Peaceful

Day being welcomed with these twin burnings,

These prophetic seeds of the Ripener,

Brightness rising and getting on with things.

Or: In the air there is a soft gleaming

As of fair light in certain hair, and wind

Through the pale curtains streaming like moonlight

In the dark air that fills all the rooms of

Dreaming like a perfumed tune that will ne'er .. .

(Vanish? A snuffed lamp in the dream of day?)

This has been all of silver. But see now:

The man of earth exhales a girl of air,

Of her light who lies beside him, gentle

And bare, under the living shawl of all

Her long hair, while her short below softly

Touches his tired thigh with welcoming.

It is that she is there. It is the pure

Return of everlastingness in her

Hands and the readiness of the sweet pear

In the touch of her mouth that fill the air

-Even the air within the circle of

His emptied arms-with light beyond seeming.

The possible metal underwater,

Beer-can or amulet, its reflections

More important than those of the surface

(Remember those jonquils we had before),

This is one thing: but another matter

Is of the precious glare in eloquent

Watery surfaces-in them, but not

Of them. And all that matters in the end

Is of the moment of late, fine morning

When the world's yellow is of burning sands

Leading down to the penultimate blue

Of, say, the Ionian Sea whose waves

Gave light that had to have been of their own

And which, when darkened momently by the

Cool shadows of our gaze, plucked up the deep

Hues of our gleaming feet at the bottom

Of our golden bodies in their purest

And most revealing element at last.