“…this profound turning away from life
and from the world takes place on a large 
scale only in periods of social stagnation
and despair.”
                     Rebecca Pitts
                     article in the New Masses

She did what you have done: watched a still sunset.
Unclouded and cool it went down, a simple sun.
Saw absently where it went down, on the third hill-
        notch.

Event of earth-mark on sun-shape, event of air
Folding in shades on shapes. She loitered with dark
To see how it came, if she could. It was easier

Not to move on, so she stood. That gathered a sigh.
Not knowing why, ineffectual she felt, human and 
        crude.
Then evening shaped and was single, like a picture.

Autumn apple-green the skies again
Burned pale, after reds and summer pinks,
And plain trees stood in the reserved sky,
One noticeably: black walnut, branched and nutted.
Then the timid drop of a winter-star
Shook low, like dew distilled, distilled to pure
Light…and evening shaped and was single, like a 
        picture.

Or so to the woman who stared, who drew it inward
It appeared, — as she looked, as she drew her breath;
As if by breathing deep she held it taut
And made it stay, and kept it light — her evening.
Her evening ending, she to see it wane.

Not knowing why, she stifled the next sigh
Just as she stifled many. But this sigh seemed
The whole sigh she had in her, stale breath of long
Years without tears. Cautiously she grew aware of 
        pain, —
Old pain no nerve recorded until now
Because poor nerve was doped in duller pain…
(Drain away, Evening, subterfuge of day-time,
Undull the sense until it whimpers out;
But rarely, rarely. How shall we else endure?
Stupefy again, after the startled whimper,
With the affairs of busy brevity, daylight cares.
We must remember our names, and the houses we 
        sleep in.)

She took the other step, one inch off centre.
She chose, seduced from routine, from neglect and habit
To try the other way. Not ours. Her nature froze
Against us, our stupidity, our natural day.
She went away. In her middle years
One twist, to look at sunset, set her off.
She had been quiet and dull too long; and now
Came, complete and strong, change total —
On this odd pivot started.

This was the mirror-hour, drowse all her own.
The lethargy of green shade in the sky
Rare as the waning instant of the day
And the distilled dew that shook its wetness on
The wan wide light — this was her mirror-hour,
As if on a crystal sky her likeness shone.
But not her likeness — the likeness of a likeness
Ideal; dead like perfection; faded like a glimpse
Of a fair woman. Take, take away
Mirrors that hang in kitchens rippled with flaws;
The mirrors of friends’ faces like their fine eyes;
Showing: to me you are this. Mirrors of limitation.
The mirror of a husband’s humor; and most of all take 
        dreams —
Gleam of discard, quick-silver poison expelled.
                                                        This evening sky,
Rare, thin, faint, dead. This is myself, myself. Oh 
        evening wan!

…(Spent life in bad purpose, bad and barren:
Pumping water with grim lips, dropping dead stove-
        lids,
Hatred of life making my hands blur under my eyes…

And tears never; nothing so clean as tears; nothing so 
        child-hearted.
But adult anger, brutal response to the plain facts 
        about me.)
Well, one more moment for waning day. One more
To ease me against the kind of night to come.
Whisper of autumn grasses. The ragged earth;
Great slut, lovely, disheveled, old and innocent.

In a luminous noose of trance she regarded the world
Day-sleep and winter-sleep and death:
Three trances to offset the level of toil —
The standard worn escapes given to men
As mark of the need to renew for better return;
These, yes. Still she tarried, to try —
Escape like a frantic bat in greening light.
Violence against everything in hodge-podge.
Boiled in her nerves. I’ll destroy
This glazed poor life, she raged. Knock one hole in 
        paper.
Somehow. Let me out. I must.
                                                You fiends and spirits,
        take me.

This evening after her moment with the sky,
She paused; delayed; looked down, to the unlike earth
Below the star — three hills, old arcs of darkness,
One on another falling with no rise; saw these,
Rolling beneath the lengthening light like waves:
Great waves washed in with three strokes of the mind–
(Short night, and longer winter, and great death) –
Set one behind the other with no day,
No lifetime of bright sense to space their dark,
Making a brightness on the floor of life
Equal in space to the height of dark impending.
Now, in her trance that poised against these waves,
Snatched brightness rode in the evening and the air,
But earth, great earth that never does dissolve
Held all the circumstance of life, death, fate and winter;
All the old forms of life, death, fate and winter.
The composed picture broke with her breathing, died.
She moved, released. The three waves rose
Easily on the rim of sky impending.
And not so lightly as the flowers droop
When the chemical joy of the sun is drained away,
But like those people in cities, fleshy and wan,
Where windows open on walls and walls hold win-
        dows more —
In the small room, to blot the reeling mind,
Who click in anguish–twitching the light to darkness,
She cut the stream and turned to sudden darkness —
Darkness, the bliss of hate, frenzy of death.

Sleep will not do. Poor pallid, twitching sleep.
Sleep was a crowded concourse of not wanted
Things, feelings, faces and broken plots.
Her hated self, her loved and hated self,
Better than sun, pure lavish, pouring joy.
The evening hour indulged her; only evening,
With that nobility her genteel nature craved
Held her fair image––poetic semblances;
Adages, faint wisdom, piety and negation.
So rarely clear, her world, so very rarely,—
Fogged and distracted often; this one evening
Hung in the west, declared the world again,
In limpid light kindly to nerves and senses.
She, lonely as all her kind had been in New England,
Gazed at the waning ray.
With daylight she might turn a culprit stone
That had familiar imprint; loose a pang
Of prescience or worry when she looked
Out some unusual window...(something there
On the black walnut limb. Behold some dream.)
Click, like a shutter click, inside a kodak, memory
Opened, re-saw, acknowledged, and shut again.
So did the trance encroach on her living day.

She fell to staring when her husband spoke
At knots in the grain of wood, at shapes, at figures
Made by the light on the floor. After weeks of not 
        seeing,
Seeing was sharp and tiny, wide as a knife-blade.
She shook when she saw. A cup or a dish
Queried or caught her eyes and she was quiet.
While time would tick in the room and a dangerous 
        stillness
Froze the bright tress, shining in noon-day sun.
She was bothered as if by flies by a flutter of sight.

Often she stood and looked at a tree by inches,
Or the ground, a ditch, the empty clothes-line swing,
Anything, anything, empty as the swing
Of a slack line. The worn place in the grass beneath 
        the swing
Of the rope — but the glimpse was gone and left her 
        mockery
Of things. Gone as finally as written lightening.
Something seized, but gone. Poor woman on
The track of a dream. Lost in the grass. In the sand.
In the daylight. In the bewildering brain.

Then the eye began the tired business of noting but 
        not seeing.
So she employed her days. Endured her nights. Walked 
        slight and level.
She said what others said; ate the same food, gestured.
Nothing was about her. Then after melancholy years
Once to stand in her faded dress consulting the sky
For omen of some sorrow not located in events called 
        real…
(This living like a creature in a shell
…To catch so many glimpses; to be
Alone in limbo! No neighborly fences
Across which to call or nod. A surly gentlewoman
Wrong in the seed planted by a fore-father
Long ago as the gate-elm. A woman of New England.
Living on a farm with a man who was no farmer.
No husband, said her face. No farmer, said the land.)

Whence was this guilt? This load of personal death, 
        despair spiritual?
Whence these bad dreams? Whence accusations,
        echoes, absurd tremors?
Intimations of past things, visages of reproach, rage, 
        horror.
None of these dwell in the estate of day; none of these
        come advancing
Across the earth as it is, these things are secret; the
        discards.
No horror in life reaches such over-tones; indeed any
        horror,
Experienced, by the clock of life, must copulate with
        these,
Have traffic with these, before they know us and hurt 
        us.
Nothing in the genteel bare life this woman lived,
        gave covert for such din;

How shall we argue with the very blood?
Or see clearly if the eye itself hold the enemy?
How shall the city stand that is already taken?
How dispel what is absorbed?

Day was faint memory. A fluid tinge. A night
Her dreams in altered symbols hemmed her round.
Not battles now, but hurts grotesque and homely.
Nicked by things cut in more real than their shapes by
        day.
Then dreams of plants gigantic, where she heard
The expanding leaf, the vein sluiced in with green
Saw green in the dark, heard green; tasted; was.
Her dreams grow close with folds and sheaths around
        her,
Like jungle shoots in swamps of noiseless leaves.
Her frantic mind remembered every night
What was not very evident all day
Until weariness, satiety, peace, dear peace, ensued.

On went the span of summer days and nights,
Widening leaves from the middle vein, rounding out
         crops,
Flavoring fruits from the centre, colored from the
         blossom-end.
Lifting the sunflower by invisible notches, daily, over
        the woodshed,
Into a child’s idea of a tree, into a giant flower,
With a face like a fringed pumpkin pie; composing
        juices
Dyed like a painter’s, purple-carmen for the beet,
The grapes essential flavor from the bland soil.
        
Blackberry vines grew through and around a skeleton
Sitting like a stiff doll on its haunch against a stone wall.
All summer the fruit swung ripe before the eye-sockets
And at last fell in purple rot coloring the bones.
Copperheads came out at night to feed, weaving
Their fish-bellies over and around the emerald, crisp,
Dew-littered stems — pronged tongues before, snake —
        naked;
A woodchuck sometimes came and sat up — plunged.
Crows long ago had ceased to visit the old man.

And when she found this melodrama of bones,
She laughed. Told no one. Ran the whole way home.
And that night had no dreams. Death concise and
        belittled.

The sunflower grew on enchanted by its lift
Out of a light seed planted.
                                            The thistles nodded,
The green grass smiled. One lane into the neglected
        garden.
One lane to the gate. The pump–handle
Was up, for lack of pumping. Some one read
Old magazines and letters in the attic.

But still the spider ran along the silk
He perfectly had reeled out from his bowel,
And stung the blue bug once between the wings.

Her eye went down two glints of spider web;
She came to see the affair midway. She stooped
And saw a battle, enormous, upon gauze.
The spider had him and he knew he had.
He neared the bug and biffed it.
The bug was like an oxen to an ant.
But still the spider ran along the silk
He perfectly had reeled out from his bowel,
And stung the blue bug once, between the wings,
Imprisoned, once under the leg that held him strung,
And once behind. That put bug in a dope.
Well, just once more, behind.
                                               Then, able nurse
The active, tender spider bent above,
Dressed him in gauze, in bands of insect flax,
To hoist him on a lever, in the end,
To a stored nest, where baby spiders all
Dark winter long might have their blue-bug meat.
Cadavers of four flies of different kinds
Wound up in mummy pomp, spider perfection,
Preserved by devilish art. Lest they should die
And stink, they slumbered unconsumed.
                                                                Well,
She thought in the sunlight that was shining like a
        madness,
Well; I like this better than dreams.
                                                        The vicious green
Laughed for her; she was taciturn.
                                                       She idled.

The thing repeated…Out of the slimy Nile
The huge cows crept with St-John’s-wort on their
        horns
And ate the lean cows; and came surging up
In a turgid river, twirling the house in eddies;
In whirls and eddies, their smooth backs running in
        currents.
Where the cows leave their hardened droppings, next
        year.
Will grow a coarser, greener and taller cone of grass,
        and the enraged soul
Must take its scythe and cut the smothering tangle,
Lay waste the lush flat color of full summer
That grows into the air and lessens space
And binds the sky itself down with its glisten
Refracted from the poison of its surface
That slides. and is so evil in its glisten.
If you go on, my soul, in this broad-leaved acre
Your fingers will sprout leaves between the digits.

In dread recoil with her soul in her hand she waited
Watching things out of dark eyes. Something fastid-
	ious shook
In her pulse, to call her to her sanity again.
But was soul sanity, or did denial alone save her?
She told herself in the face of all warm beauty:
Be sure to watch the edges where the pests
Hatch in small bags of cottony cocoons. Fear thistles.
So for a season in the house she murmured
In a dull maze.
                        He was too bound to the crops
Which spoiled, this side of harvest, every time,
While all around the rank weed, and the rough grass
Rose on the air in waves of vegetables silk —
He was too baffled by crops, and their routine,
To think of thistle crops, or wait on her soul,
Or put his ear to her heart, or kiss her mouth.

I am tired, so tired of being a person,
—One person and another and another
With spiritual colors in my shifting mind,
With spiritual needs that make me grow like a thistle.
Shadows cross my eyes that change the inner,
And hence the outer world. Morbidity my talent!
I do not want to live in one small fester
or dwell upon the fortunes of my spirit,
Holding my pulse, at helping my sickness on.

If earth’s my home and I am only dust
As I believe, and soul a sort of illness,
I'll come to dust before my date with death.
Despite this trembling worry of short years,
I’ll live by the rote on my second sight in dreams,
And beat the process of a tranced decay
By fixing all my might in the zone of things.
I'll use this giant power of bad will
Until I wear it limp or wreck my world.
I must succeed or cease; die, die, die, if need,
But in mighty satisfaction, myself, alone.

She did not think these things quite, but her blood did.
She stared at stars while pumping water, moved
Over thick grass in twilight with slow noise,
And all the storms and griefs that lie in print
Recorded on this paper did not live
In any place she was not ignorant of
Except that this was in her, steering her
As surely as the self that moved her feet
In rhythm through the thick grass, striking, too,
As surely as monotony in her heart.

The opaque night and the heat brought
The thistle in, together:
Like an actor nodding in
And bowing to a hostile friend of his,
The tall thick thistle…(Tap!)
That once had grown to tap
Against some window on some memory:
Knock, knock... knocking gravely, looking in,
Announcing desolation, grassy weedy
Infernal desolation where the Dead only
Enjoy the sound of grass roots cutting earth
Like twine-string, with infernal energy,
Knock, knock, knock, in no wind
                                          The tall thick thistle knocks,
Announcing desolation, ants and crickets and the
        pretty field mouse
Hail thistle! who bows to prove: This is a nettle world.
Lilac and beets, and mint that spreads in wetness,
These feed on some unseen and chemical
Fond goodness in this loam of many dead
To flourish a	 nettle world not well contrived	
For your unstable units, women and men.	

Death furrowed land, the day said, when she paused
To look across the valley — hanging clothes, — lovely
Individual air, and the depth above the head
Black — sprinkled small at night, and in the daytime,
Air, tall in the eternal emptiness of light…
With only the lone sun individual, superb,
Alight in this most single-minded land,
To keep the mind from thinking without hub,
To keep the vague soul fastened unforgetful
On one persistent blaze that will not hurry,
That can not be denied or made completely,
By this monotony, so great it is,   
                                       monotonous in time…
                                                                           Twice
He found her crying and would stump
In his thick boots outside to weed her garden,
Or turn new hay in silence all the pale evening
And come in like a stone man, without light,
When she was surely dignified in sleep.

Voice like light chiming, motes of pure silver,
Lonely and superb, inexhaustible as light…voice
        pleaded,
She slept with unstopped ear; heard serene song.

For when the soul is once sung out of the lungs it is
        at once immortal.
What is pure cannot be destroyed; destruction is only
Breaking what is corrupt into units of purity.
Look at the litter now, and wait; the green corruption
Will work on itself; break down; become simple.
That new rare object, that marvel of our living,
The created thing that is pure, that is hard-simple,
The song, the poem, power, living, apparent —
This inhabits the air; it dies not; unseen and unheard
Except by those few who hear, intent beyond self.

How arrange refrain, mute, meaningless, sleep-folded?

O Death, since I have known you so, forget me,
Since I have burrowed past your three dark hills
        forget me,
For I am far from ripe for your cold plunder,
And colder now than even death could make me,
Chilled with a mind that would not wait its time
But ran out to the stars in the wild cold,
Killed, numbed by curiosity, now like a hibernating
        snake.
But I have found the secrets hidden past you —
Beneath your surface gone, and come again.

I am your child. Now let me watch your children
Who know no reason for their hands and feet,
Who toss and curse and only stun their eyes
With looking with the idiot’s smile at the green moon.

Tell me, will some one, why the heart
Aches as it walks this planet, why the eyes
So prone to error, still see in the end and never
See what the heart has named for its own glory.
Slowly made aware by years and years of dark,
The anxious eyes, the eyes grown wide and honest,
See in the end this rigid grief, this medusa —
So hard it is, so sad, the outstretched hand
Jerks back before it!

Try, tired mind,
To learn your winter lesson, given each year;
See patterned earth not as the crows
Have seen, who pierce the rigid air,
But with the sun who is all glowing eye,
Or with the clouds who are one white, who glide
Over the vast, unstormed, untroubled one
Low moulded ridge
With its small black ravines
And little twists of river water in
The contour of the bottom meadow land.

Or with an insect’s eye
View this calm world, grass blade by father blade,
And every carmine bug the size of salt,
The glassy angular grain in the variegate dust,
And ribboned straw, black tubes and hollow stems,
Thresholds of houses, rotting splintered planks,
Where nets of flies crawl under tiny roofs
And follow with an insect’s little ear
The voices boring in the helms of wood.

And then return, as you must, with metaphors in store
To the metaphysical house of many, many mansions —
Its rooms of glass, its microscopes, its pain,
Its trumpets of sound, announcing loud, The Soul.
Take up the inquiry, invoke the golden hope
But see beneath the thicket of Time’s leaves,
Beneath the multiplication in all change
These sober shapes; deathless simplicities.

New England nights are pale with chilly stars,
The incessant sound of insect pain prevails.
And here the heart may break in substance thin, —
The earth meanwhile so steeped in starlit sleep,
The heart may break as slowly as it will.

May break transfixed on outward things; on twigs
Budded, dressed in small leaves; may break in the
        absence
Of all attention; may break and lie in a swoon of little
        sounds.

After velvet hours while only toads
Quanked away in faint darkness, while the elms
Hung like a spray of greater darkness, there,
She woke from one reverie and thought along
The edge of her precipice-mind. Before death’s date
I have my dusty darkness, I have my death, I drag
Things into the daylight and keep them alive, I know
How to see figures in the twisting air. I have
Tapped death, tapped the state I choose forever.
Hour when sun sets is victory; the shine
Of green evening, of the bleeding sun departing…
Already I wait with the shades that delight in his going.

She on the house-step sitting heard a note
Up the long road of dust and heavy trees,
His whistle so serene and solitary,
To tell her that she amplified her life
Past honesty or nature. He whistled softly
Thinking she did not hear. It told the mood of his
        coming.

Under the icy stars, the late stars that summer
In all its bloom and rustle, all its pipe
Of tiny crickets and its summers smells
Never could color, tint or wash with sound,
So icy pure and clean of pregnant fault
Above the mighty stillness of thick leaves.
Then when he ceased to whistle on the slope,
And became a shadow nearer, nearer merging,
She felt the first, last, only desire, to escape.

This monstrous love, with early hatred schooled: —
With mingle glance, to imitate, to know
So well the habits of the hands, the eyes…
His touch with trifles, way of mood and mind…
I cannot choose but shape myself to him.
Sharing a roof, sharing a bed, sharing
Food is insidious, is a sad communion; we follow paths
About the house, sitting or standing, we imply our
        union.

This our mutual gliding, murmuring, mimicking
Manner pulls us into warmth, into necessity
With each other. When he is near I swim against his side
With no wish, Some influence ties us in.
Familiar - strange, he is, too, too familiar.
He shocks me with his face, too, too familiar.
Is it my face; face of my family? It rises
Like a stone image I stare at, keeping me
Within the circle of its thinking eyes.
Oh, face too near, draw back a little now.
O who is he, this self, this intimate stranger?
These hands of his, I mix them with my hands,
And which are mine? and where am I, I wonder?
Sometimes I fancy that I sit behind
His eyes, in his brain; I peer and squint
Out of his eyes at myself. I know the way
His hands will always gesture, out and down;
The thumb is like myself; and the forefinger
Something I dreamed God pointed at me once.
They fascinate my eyes, his hands, his palms
Always replying by echoing themselves.
And something past the face — a constant burning
That comes too close, that will not quite come, still…
This is the great perversion — called the experience
Of love. Oh, monstrous love. Oh, monstrous…
Lost in the object, killed by too perfect nearness
With the remote man. I’ll not share darkness with him.
May he die in the sun.

I hate my soul until I think he steals it.
I hate the sun until he spreads his hands
I hate the darkness for his sometimes love.

O evening dank, ache of the sense, O last despair,
When we with the bats spread out our uncrinkling
        wings,
And flit; and wait; and grieve; and attempt to die…

She did what you have done: watched a still sunset.
Saw absently where it went down, a simple sun,
Her evening ending — she to see it wane.