Gemini

Curving between two sympathetic suns,
Where time plods slower in an ampler space,
A cloudy star its comet-orbit runs,
The twin suns staring, one on either face.

One is so old it sleeps in fiery mists;
And one electric-blue within a pod
Of darker lightnings that with veils encysts
A vision bright'ning like the brain of God.

Ever between them runs that cloud-smooth star,
A bead upon the string of gravity,
Whose isles Saturnian bask subnebular,
Reverberating with fertility.

Its fruits I dream of, lush from steaming lands:
Apples like melons, grapes like apples here;
Its pears I feel laid heavy in my hands,
Smooth with the ripeness of a double year.

There on a tropic continent's vast promontory,
Dazzled by splendid seas that never sleep,
Sits like the monster of an epic story
A dark, gigantic shepherd of huge sheep.

For him no day grows brighter toward the noon;
No afternoon pales slowly into night;
Red woods unvisited by any moon
Stand glittering in valleys mad with light.

"Darkness" is thought, but no one knows its boon.
In the long chaleur of the vibrant heat,
The light-drenched vines caduceus-like festoon
The staff that lies beside that shepherd's feet.

He never drove his flock home by the stars,
And mariners who ply those nightless seas
Steer by the shifting angle in the bars
Of light through which that planet ever flees,

While the tide currents up one epoch run,
And ebb another æon, as the slow
Curve of that planet takes it towards one sun,
Swings it forever—and then lets it go.

Till its hot oceans slowly shift again,
A half note in a rhythm set so vast
That all the generations of Earth's men
Will never live one bar of it at last.

Yet, can we think it, music not for ears,
And in that music we are not mistaken,
For the imagination overhears
Diapasons by which that star is shaken.