　　　　　　　　　　　　　　I
Of medium nature, this farouche extreme
Is a drop of lightning in an inner world,
Suspended in temporary jauntiness.

The bouquet stands in a jar, as metaphor,
As lightning itself is, likewise, metaphor
Crowded with apparitions suddenly gone

And no less suddenly here again, a growth
Of the reality of the eye, an artifice,
Nothing much, a flitter that reflects itself.

　　　　　　　　　　　　　　II
One approaches, simply, the reality
Of the other eye. One enters, entering home,
The place of meta-men and para-things,

And yet still men though meta-men, still things
Though para-things; the meta-men for whom
The world has turned to the several speeds of glass,

For whom no blue in the sky prevents them, as
They understand, and take on potency,
By growing clear, transparent magistrates,

Bearded with chains of blue-green glitterings
And wearing hats of angular flick and fleck,
Cold with an under impotency that they know,

Now that they know, because they know. One comes
To the things of medium nature, as meta-men
Behold them, not choses of Provence, growing

In glue, but things transfixed, transpierced and well
Perceived: the white seen smoothly argentine
And plated up, dense silver shine, in a land

Without a god, 0 silver sheen and shape,
And movement of emotion through the air,
True nothing, yet accosted self to self.

Through the door one sees on the lake that the white
duck swims
Away--and tells and tells the water tells
Of the image spreading behind it in idea.

The meta-men behold the idea as part
Of the image, behold it with exactness through beads
And dewy bearings of their light-locked beards.

The green bouquet comes from the place of the duck.
It is centi-colored and mille-flored and ripe,
Of dulce atmosphere, the fore of lofty scenes

But not of romance, the bitterest vulgar do
And die. It stands on a table at a window
Of the land, on a checkered cover, red and white.

The checkered squares, the skeleton of repose,
Breathe slightly, slightly move or seem to move
Toward a consciousness of red and white as one,

A vibrancy of petals, fallen, that still cling
By trivial filaments to the thing intact:
The recognizable, medium, central whole--

So near detachment, the cover's cornered squares,
And, when detached, so unimportantly gone,
So severed and so much forlorn debris.

Here the eye fastens intently to these lines
And crawls on them, as if feathers of the duck
Fell openly from the air to reappear

In other shapes, as if duck and tablecloth
And the eccentric twistings of the rapt bouquet
Exacted attention with attentive force.

A pack of cards is falling toward the floor.
The sun is secretly shining on a wall.
One remembers a woman standing in such a dress.

　　　　　　　　　　　　　　III
The rose, the delphinium, the red, the blue,
Are questions of the looks they get. The bouquet,
Regarded by the meta-men, is quirked

And queered by lavishings of their will to see.
It stands a sovereign of souvenirs
Neither remembered nor forgotten, nor old,

Nor new, nor in the sense of memory.
It is a symbol, a sovereign of symbols
In its interpretations voluble,

Embellished by the quicknesses of sight,
When in a way of seeing seen, an extreme,
A sovereign, a souvenir, a sign,

Of today, of this morning, of this afternoon,
Not yesterday, nor tomorrow, an appanage
Of indolent summer not quite physical

And yet of summer, the petty tones
Its colors make, the migratory daze,
The doubling second things, not mystical,

The infinite of the actual perceived,
A freedom revealed, a realization touched,
The real made more acute by an unreal.

　　　　　　　　　　　　　　IV
Perhaps, these colors, seen in insight, assume
In the eye a special hue of origin.
But if they do, they cast it widely round.

They cast deeply round a crystal crystal-white
And pallid bits, that tend to comply with blue,
A right red with its composites glutted full,

Like a monster that has everything and rests,
And yet is there, a presence in the way.
They cast closely round the facture of the thing

Turned para-thing, the rudiments in the jar,
The stalk, the weed, the grassy flourishes,
The violent disclosure trimly leafed,

Lean larkspur and jagged fern and rusting rue
In a stubborn literacy, an intelligence,
The prismatic sombreness of a torrent's wave.

The rudiments in the jar, farced, finikin,
Are flatly there, unversed except to be,
Made difficult by salt fragrance, intricate.

They are not splashings in a penumbra. They stand.
They are. The bouquet is a part of a dithering:
Cloud's gold, of a whole appearance that stands and is.

　　　　　　　　　　　　　　V
A car drives up. A soldier, an officer,
Steps out. He rings and knocks. The door is not
　　　locked.
He enters the room and calls. No one is there.

He bumps the table. The bouquet falls on its side.
He walks through the house, looks round him and
　　　then leaves.
The bouquet has slopped over the edge and lies on the
　　　floor.