"West-running Brook then call it."
(West-running Brook men call it to this day.)
"What does it think it's doing running west
When all the other country brooks flow east
To reach the ocean? It must be the brook
Can trust itself to go by contraries

"Young or new?"

"We must be something.
We've said we two. Let's change that to we three.
As you and I are married to each other,
We'll both be married to the brook. We'll build
Our bridge across it, and the bridge shall be
Our arm thrown over it asleep beside it.
Look, look, it's waving to us with a wave
To let us know it hears me."

"Why, my dear,

That wave's been standing off this jut of shore-"
(The black stream, catching on a sunken rock,
Flung backward on itself in one white wave,
And the white water rode the black forever,
Not gaining but not losing, like a bird.

While feathers from the struggle of whose breast
Flecked the dark stream and flecked the darker pool
Below the point, and were at last driven wrinkled
In a white scarf against the far shore alders.)
"That wave's been standing off this jut of shore

Ever since rivers, I was going to say,

Were made in heaven. It wasn't waved to us."

"It wasn't, yet it was. If not to you It was to me-in an annunciation."

"Oh, if you take it off to lady-land,
As 'twere the country of the Amazons
We men must see you to the confines of
And leave you there, ourselves forbid to enter,—
It is your brook! I have no more to say."

"Yes, you have, too. Go on. You thought of something."

"Speaking of contraries, see how the brook
In that white wave runs counter to itself.
It is from that in water we were from
Long, long before we were from any creature.
Here we, in our impatience of the steps,
Get back to the beginning of beginnings,
The stream of everything that runs away.
Some say existence like a Pirouot
And Pirouette, forever in one place,
Stands still and dances, but it runs away,
It seriously, sadly, runs away

To fill the abyss' void with emptiness.
It flows beside us in this water brook,
But it flows over us. It flows between us
To separate us for a panic moment.

It flows between us, over us, and with us.
And it is time, strength, tone, light, life and love.
And even substance lapsing unsubstantial;
The universal cataract of death

That spends to nothingness-and unresisted,
Save by some strange resistance in itself,
Not just a swerving, but a throwing back,
As if regret were in it and were sacred.
It has this throwing backward on itself.
So that the fall of most of it is always
Raising a little, sending up a little.
Our life runs down in sending up the clock.
The brook runs down in sending up our life.
The sun runs down in sending up the brook.
And there is something sending up the sun.
It is this backward motion toward the source,
Against the stream, that most we see ourselves in,
The tribute of the current to the source.

It is from this in nature we are from.
It is most us."

"Today will be the day

You said so."

"No, today will be the day

You said the brook was called West-running Brook."

"Today will be the day of what we both said."

ONCE BY THE PACIFIC

The shattered water made a misty din,
Great waves looked over others coming in,
And thought of doing something to the shore
That water never did to land before.

The clouds were low and hairy in the skies
Like locks blown forward in the gleam of eyes.
You could not tell, and yet it looked as if
The sand was lucky in being backed by cliff,
The cliff in being backed by continent.
It looked as if a night of dark intent
Was coming, and not only a night, an age.
Someone had better be prepared for rage.

There would be more than ocean water broken
Before God's last Put out the light was spoken.

THE BEAR

The bear puts both arms around the tree above her
And draws it down as if it were a lover

And its choke-cherries lips to kiss good-by,
Then lets it snap back upright in the sky.
Her next step rocks a bowlder on the wall
(She's making her cross-country in the fall.)

Her great weight creaks the barbed-wire in its staples
As she flings over and off down through the maples,
Leaving on one wire tooth a lock of hair.
Such is the uncaged progress of the bear.
The world has room to make a bear feel free;
The universe seems cramped to you and me.
Man acts more like a poor bear in a cage
That all day fights a nervous inward rage,
His mood rejecting all his mind suggests.
He paces back and forth and never rests
The toe-nail click and shuffle of his feet,
The telescope at one end of his beat,
And at the other end the microscope,
Two instruments of nearly equal hope,
And in conjunction giving quite a spread.
Or if he rests from scientific tread,
'Tis only to sit back and sway his head
Through ninety odd degrees of arc, it seems,
Between two metaphysical extremes.

He sits back on his fundamental butt

With lifted snout and eyes (if any) shut,
(He almost looks religious but he's not),

And back and forth he sways from cheek to cheek,
At one extreme agreeing with one Greek,
At the other agreeing with another Greek
Which may be thought, but only so to speak.
A baggy figure, equally pathetic

When sedentary and when peripatetic.

SAND DUNES

Sea waves are green and wet,
But up from where they die
Rise others vaster yet,
And those are brown and dry.

They are the sea made land
To come at the fisher town,
And bury in solid sand
The men she could not drown.

She may know cove and cape,
But she does not know mankind
If by any change of shape
She hopes to cut off mind.

Men left her a ship to sink;
They can leave her a hut as well,
And be but more free to think

For the one more cast-off shell.

But she stood straight still,

In broad round ear-rings, gold and jet with pearls,
And broad round suchlike brooch,

Her cheeks high colored,

Proud and the pride of friends.

The Voice asked, "You can let her choose?"

"Yes, we can let her and still triumph."

"Do it by joys. And leave her always blameless. Be her first joy her wedding,

That though a wedding,

Is yet-well, something they know, he and she.
And after that her next joy

That though she grieves, her grief is secret:

Those friends know nothing of her grief to make it shameful. Her third joy that though now they cannot help but know,

They move in pleasure too far off

To think much or much care.

Give her a child at either knee for fourth joy

To tell once and once only, for them never to forget,

How once she walked in brightness,

And make them see in the winter firelight.

But give her friends, for them she dares not tell

For their foregone incredulousness.

And be her next joy this:

Her never having deigned to tell them.

Make her among the humblest even
Seem to them less than they are.

Hopeless of being known for what she has been,
Failing of being loved for what she is,

Give her the comfort for her sixth of knowing
She fails from strangeness to a way of life

She came to from too high too late to learn.

Then send some one with eye to see

And wonder at her where she is

And words to wonder in her hearing how she came there,

But without time to stay and hear her story.

Be her last joy her heart's going out to this one

So that she almost speaks.

You know them-seven in all."

"Trust us," the Voices said.

THE EGG AND THE MACHINE

He gave

the solid rail a hateful kick.

From far away there came an answering tick;
And then another tick. He knew the code:
His hate had roused an engine up the road.