Ah, how delightful
Not to do one's duty,
Having a book to read
And not read it!
Reading's a bore,
Studying's worthless.
The sun gilds things
Without literature.

Willy nilly runs the river
Without an original edition.
And the breeze, this very one,
So natural, matutinal,
Since it has time, is in no hurry...

Lightly, quickly, soft,
A bird song
Climbs the sky as day
Begins.
I listen -it is gone.
It seemed to stop only because
I listened.

Never, never in anything-
At dawn, in splendid daylight,
Or in the golden sunset-
Have I found
A pleasure that would last
Beyond the nothingness, the loss, before coming
To enjoy it.

Symbols...
I'm tired of thinking...
Finally I lift my eyes to find your eyes eying me.
You smile, knowing just what I was thinking...

I have a terrible cold.
And everyone knows how terrible colds
Change the whole structure of the universe,
Making us sore at life,
Making us sneeze till we get metaphysical.
My day is wasted, full of blowing my nose.
My head aches vaguely.
A sad fix for a minor poet to be in!
Today I'm really a minor poet.
Whatever I was before was only wishful, and that's gone.

Fairy queen, goodbye forever!
Your wings are sunbeams, and my feet are clay.
I'll never be well if I don't stretch out on the bed.
I never was well unless I was stretched out across the universe.

Excusez un peu....What a terrible physical cold!
I need some truth and aspirin.

Some mysterious phantom's sudden hand
Between the folds of night and sleep
Shakes me till I wake, and in the night's
Abandonment, I sense no form or gesture.

But some old terror still unburied in
The heart I bear, as if from a throne
Descends and takes over as my lord
And owner, without taunt or prod or order.

And I feel my life suddenly caught up
By a rope of the unconscious
Held by whatever nighttime hand is leading me.

I feel I am nothing but a shadow
Of some form invisible that terrifies me,
And like the cold dark I exist in nothingness.

If thought is clear and feeling's clear,
Desire's clear enough;
Indifferent to achieving
What is merely gain;
Twice master, but undivided,
Of duty and my being ---

Fortune could not shelter me,
As I was not her minion.
So I lived my life and so I died,
At peace beneath the speechless skies,
By word and purpose bound.
The rest is in the hands of God!

Ah, the steamers, the voyages bound for who knows where
Of our old friend, the sailor, old So-and-So!
Ah, the glory of knowing that a man who used to walk here beside us
Was drowned off an island in the Pacific!
We who chummed around him will now discuss it with everyone
With legitimate pride, an impalpable conviction
That all this has a finer, a vaster meaning
Than the mere loss of the ship where he went down,
Went down to the bottom because water got into his lungs!

I sleep. If I dream, I do not know on waking
What it was I dreamt.
I sleep. If I do not dream, I waken
In an open space
I do not recognize, because I woke
To what I still don't know.
What is best is neither dreaming nor not dreaming
And never waking.

At the wheel of the Chevrolet on the road to Sintra
Under moonlight and dream, on the deserted road,
I drive alone, slow and easy, and it seems to me
A bit - or I make myself think it so a bit -
That I am following some other road, some other dream,
some other world,
I'm going on, not with Lisbon there behind or Sintra
ahead,
I'm going on, and what more is there to it than not
stopping, just going on?

(If I married my washwoman's daughter,
Maybe I'd be happy.)

I'm a runaway.
When I was born
They shut me up
Inside myself.
Ah, but I ran away.


If people get sick
Of living in
The same old place,
Why not of living
In the same old skin?

My soul is on
The lookout for me,
But I lie low.
Will it ever find me?
Never, I hope!

Being myself only
Means being pinned down
And no one at all.
I'll live on the run,
And really live!

I'm nothing.
I'll always be nothing.
I can't even wish to be something.
Aside from that, I've got all the world's dreams inside me.

All of us alive spend
One life in living it,
Another, thinking it.
And the only life we have
Is split between
The true one and the false.

But which is true
And which is false
No one can explain.
And as we go on living,
The life we spend's the one
That's doomed to thinking.

O Master, my master!
In the sensationalist anguish of all the felt days,
In the daily pain inflicted by the anguish of being,
I, a slave to all things, like dust to all winds,
Lift up my hands to you, so far away, so far from me!

Even so, I'm somebody.
I'm the Discoverer of Nature.
I am the Argonaut of true sensations.
I bring a new Universe into the Universe
Because I bring to the Universe its very own self.