Noon

Suddenly, in the sunlight's bitter glare On a marketplace of white, belligerent stone, The sea so blue it petrifies the air, Suddenly, in the most securely known Fixed objects, when the shift of the wind has died And form is form past ambiguity, On the deliberate stroke of a real noontide The scene is less than it was meant to be.

And in the merchant's flat, coined-metal eyes Some face before the Caesar face appears, Reflecting past the millenial market-days Time out of hope of measurement by years, Reflecting past the navel of the town, That catches in its cup the ripest sun, A glade by orderly branches overgrown Into a greener equilibrium

Of living bird entwined with living tree, As if a leaf had voice and proper flight, As if, before the raging sun could be, They had hovered in unseparated light Of moons and stars like blood in their twin veins, Ranges of sky implicit in their word, Before the worlds like incandescent grains Were from their common fire of language stirred.

Man under weight of Eden in his blood, In the broad street, in well-defined noonday, Sees the green memory of that living wood Split stone, spill sea, compell his time away— Then vanish, while the shock of noon still sings, Leaving him where he stood, there, only there, Watching his hands, those marketable things, Flat in the hollow sunlight's bitter glare.