footsteps
Hollow on the pavement
Now deserted
And blank of sound.
They die.
The crickets now are sleeping;
Even the leaves
Grow still.

     And slowly
Out of the blankness, out of the silence
Emerges on soundless wings!
The long sweet-sloping
Rise and fall of far viol notes,—
The mad Nirvana,
The faint and spectral
Dream-music
Of my heart's desire.

EMANUEL MORGAN
Opus 29

KNIVES for feet, and wheels for a chin,
And the long smooth iron bore for a neck,
And bullets for hands. . . . And the root runs in,
The root of blood no stone can check,
From the breasts of the grinding crash of sin,
From engines hugging in a wreck.

A thousand round-red mouths of pain
Blaring black,
A twisting comrade on his back
In a round-red stain,
Clotted stalks of red sumac,
Discs of the sun on a bayonet-stack . . .

Blood, flame, a cataract
Thrown upward from a desert place:
Flame and blood, the one blind fact,
Contained, or spouting from the face,
Or coiling out of bellies, packed
In a stinking spent embrace . . .

Country, a babble of black spume . . .
Faith, an eyeball in the sand . . .
Mother, a nail through a broken hand—
A kissing fume—
And out of her breast the bloody bubbling milk-red breath
Of death.

ANNE KNISH
Opus 96

YOU are the Delphic Oracle
Of the Under-World.

     As we sit talking,
All of us together,
You flash forth sudden utterance
Of buried things
That writhe in obscure life
Within our minds' last darkness.
That which we think and say not
You say and think not.
In us these thoughts
Like worms stir vilely.
But from you they depart as sudden butterflies
Crimson and green against the pure sky.

     Many are the revelers;
Few are the thyrsus-bearers;
And sole is Dionysus.

     This I inscribe to you,
Singer,
In memory of the crags of Delphi
And the Thessalian vales beyond.

EMANUEL MORGAN
Opus 40

TWO cocktails round a smile,
     A grapefruit after grace,
Flowers in an aisle
     . . . Were your face.

A strap in a street-car,
     A sea-fan on the sand,
A beer on a bar
     . . . Were your hand

The pillar of a porch,
     The tapering of an egg,
The pine of a torch
     . . . Were your leg.—

Sun on the Hellespont,
     White swimmers in the bowl
Of the baptismal font
     Are your soul.

ANNE KNISH
Opus 88

SO we came back again
After some years—
Just revisiting
The scenes of our sin.
Nothing is there but the garden;
And we had expected
That we would be there.

     I heard a wind blowing
Down the sky.
It came with heavy auguries
And passed.
There was a soothsayer once in Rome
Who on a white altar
Inspected the purple entrails of victims.

EMANUEL MORGAN
Opus 47

GIVER of bribes in the brightness of  morning,
     Cities have wavered and rocked and gone down . . .
But the lamps of the altars hang round you, adorning
     The niche of your neck and the drift of your gown.

O bribe-giver, marked with purple metal—
     Cut in your naked contentment there shows
On the curve of your breast one carven petal
     From heaven's impenetrable rose!

You open the window to myriad windows,
     The high triangular door of the world . . .
Till the walls and the roofs and the curious keystone,
     The carven rose with its petals uncurled,

Are swayed in the swathe of the uppermost ether,
     Where stars are the columns upholding a dome,
And the edifice rolls on a corner of ocean,
     Lifts on a wave, poises on foam . . .

We stand on the rose, we are images golden,
     We move interchanging, attaining one crest:
One chin and one mouth and one nose and one forehead,
     One mouth and one chin and one neck and one breast . . .

I pull you apart from me, struggle to bind you,
     I free you, I rend you in seven great rays . . .
And we cling to them all . . . but we lose them, and slowly—
     We slip with the rainbow down the blue bays.

ANNE KNISH
Opus 122

UPSTAIRS there lies a sodden thing
Sleeping.
Soon it will come down
And drink coffee.
I shall have to smile at it across the table.
How can I?
For I know that at this moment
It sleeps without a sign of life; it is as good as dead.
I will not consort with reformed corpses,
I the life-lover, I the abundant.
I have known living only;
I will not acknowledge kinship with death.
White graves or black, linen or porphyry,
Are all one to me.
And yet, on the Lybian plains
Where dust is blown,
A king once
Built of baked clay and bulls of bronze
A tomb that makes me waver.

EMANUEL MORGAN
Opus 46

I ONLY know that you are given me
     For my delight.
No other angle finishes my soul
     But you, you white.

I know that I am given you,
     Black whirl to white,
To lift the seven colors up . . .
     Focus of light!

ANNE KNISH
Opus 1

REITERATION! . . .

The seconds bob by,
So many, so many,
Each ugly in its own way
As raw meats are all ugly.
Why do we feed on the dead?
Or would at least it were with cries and lust
Of slaying our human food
Beneath a cannibal sun!
But these old corpses of alien creatures! . . .
I loathe them!
And too many heads go by the window,
All alien—
Filers of saws, doubtless,
Or lechers
Or Sabbath-keepers.
Morality comes from God.
He was busy.
He forgot to make beauty.
Why does he not call back into their hen-house
This ugly straggling flock of seconds
That trail by
With pin-feathers showing?

EMANUEL MORGAN
Opus 55

WHY ask it of me?—the impossible!—
     Shall I pick up the lightning in my hand?
Have I not given homages too well
     For words to understand?—

Words take you from me, bring you back again,
     Dance in our presence, cover your proud face
With the incredible counterpane,
     Break our embrace . . .

No, not to you
     Your wish,
But to some kangaroo
     Or cuttle-fish

Or octopus or eagle or tarantula
     Or elephant or dove
Or some peninsula
     Let me speak love—

Or call some battle or some temple-bell
     Or many-curving pine
Or some cool truth-containing well
     Or thin cathedral—mine!

ANNE KNISH
Opus 200

IF I should enter to his chamber
And suddenly touch him,
Would he fade to a thin mist,
Or glow into a fire-ball,
Or burst like a punctured light-globe?
It is impossible that he would merely yawn and rub
And say—"What is it?"

EMANUEL MORGAN
Opus 17

MAN-THUNDER, woman-lightning,
     Rumble, gleam;
Refusal,
     Scream.

Needles and pins of pain
     All pointed the same way;
Parellel lines of pain