to quaff
Goblets of liquid firmament--
Thank God that we can laugh!

Hushed are the plains where Asia poured
The blood of peacock kings--
But we can echo, thank the Lord,
What the China teapot sings:

Nothing bereaves
The eternal tune
Of little crisp leaves
Green in the moon.

The night is deeper still with snow . . .
O let us never stir
From the mirthful secrets that we know
Of old diameter!
Eve laughed at Adam long ago,
And Adam laughed at her.

ANNE KNISH
_Opus 150_

SOUNDS, pure sounds--
Nothing--
Vibrancies of the air--
And yet--

This summer night
There are crickets shrilling
Beyond the deep bassoon of frogs.
They cease for a moment
As the rattling clangor
Of the trolley
Bumps by.
I hear 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 again