GOLD MORNING, SWEET PRINCE

What the sad and passionate gay player of Avon avowed
With vivid exactness, eloquent variety is, as immense

As the sea is. The sea which neither the humble nor the proud
Can dam, control or master. No matter what our sense
Of existence, or whence we come or where we hope and seek
He knew us all before we were, he knew the strong, the weak,
The silly, the reticent, the pious, the powerful, the experience
Of fortune, sudden fame, extreme reversed, inevitable loss
Whether on land or sea. He knew mortality's immortality
And essential uncertainty, as he knew the land and sea.

He knew the reality of nobility.

He saw the cowering, towering power of treachery.

He hated the flakes and butterflies of lechery.

And he believed, at times, in truth, hope, loyalty and charity.

Look, he saw what was and what is and what has yet to come to be:
A gentle king murdered in helpless sleep.

A girl by Regent hypocrisy seduced.

A child by Archduke ambition stabbed and killed.

A loving loyal wife by a husband loyal and brave,
Falsely suspected, by a handkerchief accused,
Stabbed by his love, his innocence, his trust

In the glib cleverness of a self-hating knave

3.

Some are defeated, some are mistreated, some are fulfilled and some come to flower and succeed

In knowing the patience of energy from the dark root to the rounding fruit.

And if this were not true, if love were not kind and cruel,

Generous and unjust, heartless and irresistible, painful to the savant and gentle, even the fool,

Fecund and various, wasteful and precarious, lavish, savage, and tender, begetting the lion and the lamb

The peacock, the spaniel, the tiger, the lizard, the chicken hawk and the dove

All would be nothing much, all would be trivial, nothing would be enough, love would not be love.

For, as there is no game and no victory when no one loses

So there is no choice but the choice of love, unless one chooses

Never to love, seeking immunity, discovering nothingness.

This is the only sanctuary, this is the one asylum unless

We hide in a dark dark, and deny, refuse to believe in hopes, consciousness

And refuse to hope, until he descends, in the unknown, hidden and ultimateodeve,

Crying forever with all the others who are damned and hopeless that love is not love.

night

Gold morning, sweet prince, black/has always descended and has always ended,

Gold morning, prince of Avon, sovereign and king

Or reality, hope, and speech, may all the angels sing

With all their sweetness and all the truth with which you sang of any thing and everything.

A LITTLE MORNING MUSIC

The birds in the first light twitter and whistle,

Chirp and seek, sipping and chortling--weakly, meekly, they
speak and bubble

As cheerful as the cherry would, if it could speak when it is
cherry ripe or cherry ripening.

meledious,

And all of them are/erratic, and gratuitous,

Singing solely to heighten the sense of morning's beginning.

How soon the heart's cup overflows, how it is excited to
delight and elation!

And in the first light, the cock's chant, roaring,

Bursts like rockets, rising and breaking into brief brilliance;

As the fields arise, cock after cock catches on fire,

And the pastures loom out of vague blue shadow,

The red barn and the red sheds rise and redden, blocks and boxees
of slowly blooming wet redness;

Then the great awe and splendor of the sun comes nearer,

Kindling all things, consuming the forest of blackness, lifting
and lighting up

All the darkling ones who slept and grew

Beneath the petals, the frast, the mystery and the mockery of the
stars.

The darkened ones turn slightly in the faint light of the small
morning,

Grow grey or glow green--

They are grey or green at once

A LITTLE MORNING MUSIC

2.

In the pale cool of blue light;
They dream of that other life and that otherness
Which is the darkness, going over
Maple and oak, leafy and rooted in the ancient and famous light,
In the bondage of the soil of the past and the radiance of the future.
But now the morning is growing the sun is soaring, all
That lights up shows, quickly or slowly, the showering plenitude
of fountains,
And soon an overflowing radiance, actual and dazzling, will blaze
and brim over all of us,
Discovering and uncovering all color and all kinds, all forms and
all distances, rising and rising higher
and higher, like a stupendous bonfire of consciousness,
Gazing and blazing, blessing and possessing all vividness
and all darkness.

A LITTLE MORNING MUSIC

The birds in the first light chatter and twitter, tinkle
and whistle, seek, sip, chortle

Cheery
as cherries would be if they sang as they ripened,

(How soon the heart's cup overflows, melodious and gratititious,
And in the first light the cock's chant bursts like rockets

And sets off a choir like a firing squad of firecrackers
of other distant roosters,

And the fields arise, kindled,
The red barns and the red sheds emerge slowly

From vague blocks of looming blue shadow

All things catch on fire quickly or slowly, the darkling
ones

Which slept or grew under the frost of the mockery of the
glittering irony of the stars

Faintly waken in the faint light

Grow gray--or grow green:

They are grey and green at once in the pale and cool of
the blue light

Which is the light of the dream or that other life and
otherness

Which is the darkness going over, Maple and oak, leafy and
rooted,

Lean toward the bondage of the past as their branches soar
toward the desire of the future

And everything seems to show, as all shows, in the
growing blaze, as showers and fountains

--Before thought, beyond purpose--

Which are the ecstacy of being's becoming, and being, an
overwhelming radiance brimming over, flowing under,
pouring all over

In the self-delight which still sleep dreamed all night
it would somehow discover.