Out of School: To José Garcia Villa

THE gold, the wild-beast fires begin again upon the fruit-boughs
Running from branch to branch, and our gold veins
Catch fire. In the caverns where our blood begins
Sound the ancestral voices

That are not fire but fate, blind impulse and predestination
Foretelling doom.
And the fleece of Marsyus, the last melting snow upon the branches
Trembles no more at the flute-sound.
O heart, it is spring!

And the wild-beast fires, the furred-lynx fruit-buds, the young winds
And the young tendrils of those vines the gold spring rains
Fall from the branches.

And from the hoarse voice of the stream freed from the ice
The animal laughters sound —
The neighings of the prophet horse arise
Who prophesied great evils once (and the spring thunders run
Along the ground
From his foretelling hoof); the bray
Of the world of asses following Darius —
The sound that scattered the great Scythian hordes;
The sound of the crowd’s onolatry, and after
The Ritual Laughter at the escape from death:
For this is the age of the destroying Laughter.

In the forest there are great emerald mists from which the bird-songs
Fall, the Cassandra voices. Through green lightnings and the emeralds
Fallen from the trees
The young green sun of spring,
A laughing ghost, danced; with a ghostly voice
Calls to the children “See! New worlds and emeralds and Fates begin.

Soon will my greenness fade and I shall wear my own gold armour,

Fighting the mists.”

And the children run from school
To the sound of the planetary system in the veins,
The beat of the young rains
And the thunder of the wild wood lilies’ growth beneath the ground.

They flee the old man who all morning long
Sifted a little dust through his dry hands
And boomed at the children “Once this dust was Socrates,

The first spring sage, the satyr under the furred-lynx fruit-buds
Tearing, the tendrils of the young spring rains
And, where the sap like peridots and beryls
Rise in the budding fig-branches, foretelling perils
Upon his flute that seemed like the young mist
Of spring, to the caverns where our blood begins.

Now is he but the emerald dust of lilies:
He is alone
With but the small equalities of dust.
And the green mist of spring will soon be gone, the Sun in his gold armour

Shout through the budding branches. Ere it is too late
You must discriminate

Between true gold and false, between the Sun that is the ghost
Of your own heart, and the Sun the world has lost.
When to your Sun

Arise the breath of all the cultivated earth,

Gold mists from vines,
And all gold airs and prayers from cities, Man
Seeing his mirrored morning face, no more can find
The mask he wore through centuries
(Of faith and hope). The gold corrosive of the hypermodern suns
Of unbelief have shone upon them. They are gone

And only emptiness remains. This is the only good.
O fear that laughing ghost in his gold armour high in air
Who calls to you.”

But the children run from school
To learn their wisdom from the great gold fool
Who is to the world of sight
What truth is to the invisible-life-giver of all voices
In sap and bud, life-giver of mankind.

He sees through the rough Ape-dust the gold fires
Of the spirit spring like the wild-beast fires upon the branches;
The little and the great
The shadows of the crooked and the straight
Complete each other, and the cripple’s hump,
The curve of the mountain hiding veins of gold
As equal in their grandeur! Sees the common lump
Of the world hold the seed of the flower the wisdom of the dark
Formed with an angel’s innocence; the old
And wrinkled mask of Pithecanthropus Erectus
Hide the great brow of Socrates; the ass’s ears
And the almond husk of the earth as no wise less
In grandeur than the long rivers and the almond husk
Of that great sleepy animal the world.

He sees the gold blood in the veins of plants and men
Have the beat of the gold planetary system; sees
The plant, a beast retarded by the dark,
(Whose root had once been gold, but changed by growth),
The beast, a plant that blossoms, freed by light.
Devoid of root like the planets, those bright bees
That move in heaven about their honeycombs of light.
And are forms of time that imitate the eternal-made
That from their unerring courses we might learn
From the intelligence in the wide heavens.
And the perturbed might learn from the unperturbed,
Set right the inharmonious errors of our lives,

And fear not change or Time and darkness, but behold
The elements are but as qualities
That change for ever like all things that have known generation, like a gold
Image taking a new form forever, mutable
As the child who is innocence and oblivion, acceptance,
A new beginning, primal motion, a self-moving game that changes
Like the heart of forgetful spring.