The Cento: A Collection of Collage Poems

Green Is the Night and Out of Madness Woven

91 CArmIne esPosITo Green Is the Night and Out of Madness Woven I. A refrain from the end of the boulevards, Are sounds blown by a blower into shapes, A doctrine to this landscape. Yet, having just stripped one of all one’s torments, concealed That such ferocities could tear The tongue, the fingers, and the nose This arrival in the wild country of the soul, smacks like fresh water in a can, like the sea The poison in the blood will have been purged, The rusty, battered shapes Of the mind that forms itself skims the real for its unreal II. Without ideas in a land without ideas One would continue to contend with one’s ideas. The sky is too blue, the earth too wide. This great world, it divides itself in two, Too conscious of too many things at once, The law of chaos is the law of ideas The whole of the wideness of night is for you, If the stars that move together as one, disband, Their brilliance through the lattices, crippled 92 This chaos will not be ended, It glares beneath the webs The blood-red redness of the sun, III. In the sum of the parts, there are only the parts. That elemental parent, the green night, Was less than moonlight. nothing exists by itself. The deer and the dachshund are one. The hand between the candle and the wall And the river that batters its way over stones, What is it that my feeling seeks? The companion in nothingness Older than any man could be. The black wind of the sea The street lamps The world as word, IV. The moonlight crumbled to degenerate forms, each drop a petty tri color. For this, The shadows lessen on the walls. And, like an insatiable actor, slowly and As if yesterday’s people continued to watch We buried the fallen without jasmine crowns. 93 The mind is the great poem of winter, the man If, while he lives, he hears himself The actor that will at last declaim our end. The shadow of the pears no shadows of themselves. That’s what misery is, V. Green is the night and out of madness woven, By a wind that seeks out shelter from snow. Thus It may be that the ignorant man, alone, Held in his hand the suave egg-diamond One sparrow is worth a thousand gulls, And must be loved, as one loves that On the ground, fixed fast in a profound defeat. At the neutral centre, the ominous element Became the form and the fragrance of things The premiss from which all things were conclusions, After the final no there comes a yes In which we pronounce joy like a word of our own. ...