I

Round muscles in the damp womb
Move. Child (folded, articulated: knees bent, back rounded)
Fills the dark wholly. Knee jerks shortly, entirely silent.
Surges of blood in the smaller veins beat perhaps now more sharply.

Begins--
(Hand jumps against the soft wall)--

But for the bound darkness,
Back, back sinking!
The dark pressure, slowly absolute.
Lurches (soundless). Forced muscle to muscle
pressed blind unroping, parting the live personal flesh.
That is it! (The woman screaming) Round baby-head to the battered light
(O God she)

(But dawned in the veins unmoved and unremarkably warm)
New light blunts on the body, shatters in vacant eyes. Shot thru
already

This stuff with fragile passages. Light has delicate forceps.

The world leaps against the wall,
Spread shapes, colours dissolving. This has been standing
How long, in the waiting light, visible?

Born! Pulses accurately,
Surges down soft wrists.

Begins unhesitating.
(Of all we three only) Damp throat beneath, firm with muscles. To
which

Born? (No return. The woman
Again the woman. The path sealed, no dark pool of comfort.)
The woman returns. Here dropped the world.

But the warm breasts, drawing from inward,
(The round muscles, the ribbed cavern, untaut, unsuspended)
Life irrevocably bright. But the warm breasts, outreached,
Have followed him.

G.A.Oppen
1243 Water St.
Sausalito, Cal.

This room,
the circled wind
Straight air of dawn
low noon
The darkness. Not within
The mound of these
Is anything
To fit the prying of your lips,
Or feed their wide bright flowering.

And yet will movement so exactly fit
Your limbs--

As snow
Fills the vague intricacies of the day, unlit
Before, so will your arms
Fall in the space
Assigned to gesture

(In the momentless air,
The distant, adventurous snow))

When, having entered--

Your coat slips smoothly from your shoulders to the waiter:

How, in the face of this, shall we remember;
Should you stand suddenly upon your head

Your skirts would blossom downward
Like an anemone.

G.A.Oppen
1243 Water ST.
Sausalito, Cal.

The moon rose like a rising moon,
And you beside me sitting silent, or as silently,

Turned, as one who turns, to say,
How beautiful it is; as who should say, How beautiful
It is.

Your lips too red for lips,
Your nose not always like a nose;
I love you as I love
You,
as I
Love.

If my body were like yours--

I would be alone. With dragging fingers find the hollow
between breast and shoulder.

close hips, close legs straightening down the sheets--

Piercing in maiderhair, a candle in my own similar hand
Would fittingly excite me.

Prophecy in Pastels

It has been china, then--

Thin and smooth and delicately figured in meticulous line.
And we shall think of teas and a vague trend;

A leaf, caught breathlessly on air:

So shall we think of her,

A fine tracery intricately planned on air,

And walls declining tastefully to hedges.

We shall think of her and teas and china laughter,

Life a trifle thin about the edges.

For the rest, it may be,

Strange, but poised to china dignity,

She shall go down, she shall go down--

A small handful, pitifully,

Of somewhat rose-tinged dust.

G.A.Oppen
1243 Water st
Sausalito, Cal.

Drift of shining small fish hangs low over the fine sand
Soft to shadow:

High at the tank's top eel-like fish turn upward, showing clowns
soft white faces.
Three shadowless and accurately finned huge fish mysteriously
suspended; untouched, unadventurous,

Three shadowless and accurately finned huge fish mysteriously
suspended; untouched, unadventurous,
Drift untwitching above the
Minnows (silent),
And stop, with noses held to

Adequate, dissolving points.

G,A.Oppen
1243 Water St.
Sausalito,Cal.

Here put your head, that desires nothing except familiarly:
There your feet, bending your knees so that, bare (I remember
from childhood), they would smell salt-sweet.

There have been women, but of course you are not any one
of these.

Have you any idea that of a thousand women you are one, and
of two thousand also one?

And as many men. One's brief and sudden self
Howsoever slowly time passes.

Inland

Gaunt streets bristle toward the cathedral;
Fear, hate of this tall white weakness.

Four steps lead to the doorway, and the shutter is open at the window,
And solitude dives like a swallow to the high window-- the priest
has said a prayer for those at sea.

(But not the priest in a prayer of white marble: the tangled
streets and knotted eyes supplicate, in some grey crowded
way, the raveled sea)

And solitude, unbroken to the window.

XIV

G.A. Oppen
1243 Water St.
Sausalito, Cal.

The light unadvancing thru unregainable unterraced heights,
And the world accepted into the old renewed grey tunnels of the air,
so that the trees are rootless and too suddenly dead.

The ways, the perishable suppleness.

Such a thing is in my mind as in the square rooms of a city during night.
Men stumble in the dark

On blindness or on sourceless streams of sight.

So the thin, unstreaming
Glare of the ocean.--

A private world, insufficiently filled.

Tree of space, unblossoming, O clamp down harder your long skinny strong
strength

And the earth grow limited beneath me
With an inagility I understand.

As I lift the glass to drink,
I smell the water:
Suddenly, the summer.

When my socks will be thick in my shoes

And the room's noise will go dim behind me

As I lean out a high window,
My hands on the stone.

Now pray the walled world
Heavily to open its low doors
And let walk forth across the pavement
As space swells and drops, some actual uprisen man, woman--
(Not the slight building tops unclasped mid-high in the incoherent
Day, nor globular stars shall margin it).

Bare,

To receive and quench
The thin paths of venture.

In fields the silence hard between your breasts--.
Your breath is rythmically whole, filling your wide dark supple
(Pool-like) silent chest.

And quick. They stitch, I think,
The air and earth together. Stiff-fingered on my lips
They draw a gossamer round belly of air to me,
Between your round light fingers quick to drink.

So he stood on the island-- over the sea
Until creation was a cone with polished sides.

Staring-- a man before a bill-board.

Looked to where the shallow-edged sea drew at a pebble, white
Whole; pebble even nowhere. Emerged
Clearly into solitude.

He

Possibly saw creation

Barely curve the water,

Circumscribe his unshaping feet.

We, you and I, will go all over the world.

Will feel minutely, adequately heavy as a curving kite-string from a
hill.

Fields, the porches of houses, the cornered ways of cities--

We will walk everywhere as at each step our toes spread on grass.

Heads above them, interval planed by chins.

On the island (if he smiled ever smiled)

Sank his feet slightly into sand. Filling nothing.