And yonder on our spacious bed
     Fashioned for love and sleep
The Autumn goldenrod lies dead,
     The maple-leaves lie deep.

III.  Studies and Designs

A Japanese Vase
(A Design to be Wrought in Metals)

Five harsh, black birds in shining bronze come crying
Into a silver sky,
Piercing and jubilant is the shape of their flying,
Their beaks are pointed with delight,
Curved sharply with desire,
The passionate direction of their flight,
Clear and high,
Stretches their bodies taut like humming wire. 
The cold wind blows into angry patterns the jet-bright
Feathers of their wings,
Their claws curl loosely, safely, about nothingness,
They clasp no things. 
Direction and desire they possess
By which in sharp, unswerving flight they hold
Across an iron sea to the golden beach
Whereon lies carrion, their feast.  A shore of gold
That birds wrought on a vase can never reach.

The Bow Moon
(A print by Hiroshige)

From the dawn, Take San,
Ungathered star,
Follow me back through night
Till I recapture
Evening.

(The bending hours of darkness
Sway apart like lilies
Before the backward-blowing wind.)

At last,
Bearing in her mysterious bosom
Unravished beauty,
Dark Yesterday rises to view against her silent sky
Irrevocable... secret... 
Confronting the fantastic dream
Of an impossible Tomorrow.

And that frail bridge,
Delicate, immutable,
Which rises higher than the moon,
More everlasting than the fading sky,
Joining What-was-not with What-might-have-been,
That bridge were named “Today”
If I had loved you, Take San,
If you had loved me.

An Italian Chest
(Lorenzo Designs a Bas-Relief)

Lust is the oldest lion of them all
And he shall have first place,
With a malignant growl, satirical,
To curve in foliations prodigal
Round and around his face,
Extending till the echoes interlace
With Pride and Prudence, two cranes, gaunt and tall.

Four lesser lions crouch and malign the cranes,
Cursing and gossiping they shake their manes
While from their long tongues leak
Drops of thin venom as they speak. 
The cranes, unmoved, peck grapes and grains
From a huge cornucopia, which rains
A plenteous meal from its antique
Interior (a note quite curiously Greek).

And nine long serpents twist
And twine, twist and twine,
A riotously beautiful design
Whose elements consist
Of eloquent spirals, fair and fine,
Embracing cranes and lions, who exist
Seemingly free, yet tangled in that living vine.

And in this chest shall be
Two cubic meters of space
Enough to hold all memory
Of you and me—­
And this shall be the place
Where silence shall embrace
Our bodies, and obliterate the trace
Our souls made on the purity
Of night... 
Now lock the chest, for we
Are dead, and lose the key!