The Blue Horses

I
What loud wave-motioned hooves awaken
Our dream-fast members from the cramp of sleep?
The tribal images are shaken
And crash upon their guardians. The skies
Are shivered like a pane of glass.
Progeny of winds, sea-forms, earth-bestriders,
From the blue quarries of their natal hills
Terribly emerging to their riders,
Blue Horses lift their neighing trumpets to the moon!
They stamp among the spiritual mills
That weave a universe from our decay:
The specious outline crumbles at the shock
Of visionary hooves, and in dismay
Men hide among the tumbled images.
The silver trumpets strike the moon!
O grasp the mane with virgin hand:
Beneath the knocking of the magic hoof
New spaces open and expand.
For in the world are spaces infinite
And each point is a mighty room
Where flowers with strange faces bloom
In the amazing light;
And every little crystal minute
Has many aeons locked within it
Within whose crystal depths we see
Times upon times eternally.
II
The whittled moon
Lies on the steep incline of night
Flanked by a stair of fading stars.
The hooves are silent.
Chimney-stacks
Pour their first smoke-trail across
The lightening cloud-bars.
The first wheel clacks
On grinding gears,
The pulley whirrs upon its boss.
Naked you lie and your own silence keep;
The arms of love are laid aside in sleep.
Soon it will be day like other days:
I cannot hold this hour in my hand
Nor press
Its image on a substance beyond time.
Possess!
But we are never in possession
And nothing stays at our command.
Possess!
Yet day comes on.
The delicate steel cranes manoeuvre
Like giant birds above their load;
The high song of the tyres is heard
Along the whitening road.
Possess!
All things escape us, as we too escape.
We have owned nothing and have no address
Save in the poor constriction
Of a legal or poetic fiction.
He that possesses is possessed
And falsifies perception lest
The visionary hooves break through
The simple seeming world he knew.
The harbour derricks swing their load upon the shore.
The sacred turbines hum, the factories
Set up their hallowed roar.
Men must awake betimes and work betimes
To furnish the supplies of war.
For some shall work and some possess
And all shall read the morning papers
And in the world's ripped entrails there displayed
Haruspicate for trends of love and trade.
Sleep no more, for while you sleep
Our love is stolen by the cheating sun
And angry frightened men destroy
Our peace with diktat, pact, and gun.
The old men of the tribe go mad
And guard with malice, fraud and guile
The sacred enzymes of a world gone bad.
The hoof-beats thunder in my ears.
Leave to the councillors the garbage-plot,
The refuse and the greasy tins
Of this slum-culture—these are not
The area where love begins.
The brutal and the vile are set
As watchers at the gate,
But the Blue Horses scream aloud:
A sudden movement shakes the crowd
Stampeded on the hooves of fate.