I see the boys of summer

I

I see the boys of summer in their ruin / Lay the gold tithings barren, / Setting no store by harvest, freeze the soils; / There in their heat the winter floods / Of frozen loves they fetch their girls, / And drown the cargoed apples in their tides. // These boys of light are curdlers in their folly, / Sour the boiling honey; / The jacks of frost they finger in the hives; / There in the sun the frigid threads / Of doubt and dark they feed their nerves; / The signal moon is zero in their voids. // I see the summer children in their mothers / Split up the brawned womb’s weathers, / Divide the night and day with fairy thumbs; / There in the deep with quartered shades / Of sun and moon they paint their dams / As sunlight paints the shelling of their heads. // I see that from these boys shall men of nothing / Stature by seedy shifting, / Or lame the air with leaping from its heats; / There from their hearts the dogdayed pulse / Of love and light bursts in their throats. / O see the pulse of summer in the ice.

II

But seasons must be challenged or they totter / Into a chiming quarter / Where, punctual as death, we ring the stars; / There, in his night, the black-tongued bells / The sleepy man of winter pulls, / Nor blows back moon-and-midnight as she blows. // We are the dark deniers, let us summon / Death from a summer woman, / A muscling life from lovers in their cramp, / From the fair dead who flush the sea / The bright-eyed worm on Davy’s lamp, / And from the planted womb the man of straw. // We summer boys in this four-winded spinning, / Green of the seaweeds’ iron, / Hold up the noisy sea and drop her birds, / Pick the world’s ball of wave and froth / To choke the deserts with her tides, / And comb the county gardens for a wreath. // In spring we cross our foreheads with the holly, / Heigh ho the blood and berry, / And nail the merry squires to the trees; / Here love’s damp muscle dries and dies, / Here break a kiss in no love’s quarry. / O see the poles of promise in the boys.

III

I see you boys of summer in your ruin. / Man in his maggot’s barren. / And boys are full and foreign in the pouch. / I am the man your father was. / We are the sons of flint and pitch. / O see the poles are kissing as they cross. // When once the twilight locks no longer // When once the twilight locks no longer / Locked in the long worm of my finger / Nor damned the sea that sped about my fist, / The mouth of time sucked, like a sponge, / The milky acid on each hinge, / And swallowed dry the waters of the breast. // When the galactic sea was sucked / And all the dry seabed unlocked, / I sent my creature scouting on the globe, / That globe itself of hair and bone / That, sewn to me by nerve and brain, / Had stringed my flask of matter to his rib. // My fuses timed to charge his heart, / He blew like powder to the light / And held a little sabbath with the sun, / But when the stars, assuming shape, / Drew in his eyes the straws of sleep, / He drowned his father’s magics in a dream. // All issue armoured, of the grave, / The redhaired cancer still alive, / The cataracted eyes that filmed their cloth; / Some dead undid their bushy jaws, / And bags of blood let out their flies; / He had by heart the Christ-cross-row of death. // Sleep navigates the tides of time; / The dry Sargasso of the tomb / Gives up its dead to such a working sea; / And sleep rolls mute above the beds / Where fishes’ food is fed the shades / Who periscope through flowers to the sky. // When once the twilight screws were turned, / And mother milk was stiff as sand, / I sent my own ambassador to light; / By trick or chance he fell asleep / And conjured up a carcass shape / To rob me of my fluids in his heart. // Awake, my sleeper, to the sun, / A worker in the morning town, / And leave the poppied pickthank where he lies; / The fences of the light are down, / All but the briskest riders thrown / And worlds hang on the trees.