I Make This In A Warring Absence

I make this in a warring absence when Each ancient, stone-necked minute of love's season Harbours my anchored tongue, slips the quaystone, When, praise is blessed, her pride in mast and fountain Sailed and set dazzling by the handshaped ocean, In that proud sailing tree with branches driven Through the last vault and vegetable groyne, And this weak house to marrow-columned heaven, Is corner-cast, breath's rag, scrawled weed, a vain And opium head, crow stalk, puffed, cut, and blown, Or like the tide-looped breastknot reefed again Or rent ancestrally the roped sea-hymen, And, pride is last, is like a child alone By magnet winds to her blind mother drawn, Bread and milk mansion in a toothless town. She makes for me a nettle's innocence And a silk pigeon's guilt in her proud absence, In the molested rocks the shell of virgins, The frank, closed pearl, the sea-girls' lineaments Glint in the staved and siren-printed caverns, Is maiden in the shameful oak, omens Whalebed and bulldance, the gold bush of lions, Proud as a sucked stone and huge as sandgrains. These are her contraries: the beast who follows With priest's grave foot and hand of five assassins Her molten flight up cinder-nesting columns, Calls the starved fire herd, is cast in ice, Lost in a limp-treed and uneating silence, Who scales a hailing hill in her cold flintsteps Falls on a ring of summers and locked noons. I make a weapon of an ass's skeleton And walk the warring sands by the dead town. Cudgel great air, wreck east, and topple sundown, Storm her sped heart, hang with beheaded veins Its wringing shell, and let her eyelids fasten. Destruction, picked by birds, brays through the jaw-bone, And, for that murder's sake, dark with contagion Like an approaching wave I sprawl to ruin. Ruin, the room of errors, one rood dropped Down the stacked sea and water-pillared shade, Weighed in rock shroud, is my proud pyramid; Where, wound in emerald linen and sharp wind, The hero's head lies scraped of every legend, Comes love's anatomist with sun-gloved hand Who picks the live heart on a diamond. 'His mother's womb had a tongue that lapped up mud,' Cried the topless, inchtaped lips from hank and hood In that bright anchorground where I lay linened, 'A lizard darting with black venom's thread Doubled, to fork him back, through the lockjaw bed And the breath-white, curtained mouth of seed.' 'See,' drummed the taut masks, 'how the dead ascend: In the groin's endless coil a man is tangled.' These once-blind eyes have breathed a wind of visions, The cauldron's root through this once-rindless hand Fumed like a tree, and tossed a burning bird; With loud, torn tooth and tail and cobweb drum The crumpled packs fled past this ghost in bloom, And, mild as pardon from a cloud of pride, The terrible world my brother bares his skin. Now in the cloud's big breast lie quiet countries, Delivered seas my love from her proud place Walks with no wound, nor lightning in her face, A calm wind blows that raised the trees like hair Once where the soft snow's blood was turned to ice. And though my love pulls the pale, nippled air, Prides of to-morrow suckling in her eyes, Yet this I make in a forgiving presence.