The Summer Image

(From a Persian Carpet)

Ash and strewments, the first moth-wings, pale

Ardour of brief evenings, on the fecund wind;

Or all a wing, less than wind,

Breath of low herbs upfloats, petal or wing,

Haunting the musk precincts of burial.

For the season of newer riches moves triumphing,

Of the evanescence of deaths. These potpourris

Earth-tinctured, jet insect-bead, cinder of bloom—

How weigh while a great summer knows increase,

Ceaselessly risen, what there entombs?—

Of candour fallen from the slight stems of Mays,

Corrupt of the rim a blue shades, pensively:

So a fatigue of wishes will young eyes.

And brightened, unpurged eyes of revery, now

Not to glance to fabulous groves again!

For now deep presence is, and binds its close,

And closes down the wreathed alleys escape of sighs.

And now rich time is weaving, hidden tree,

The fable of orient threads from bough to bough.

Old rinded wood, whose lissomeness within

Has reached from nothing to its covering

These many corymbs’ flourish!—And the green

Shells which wait amber, breathing, wrought

Towards the still trance of summer’s centering,

Motives by ravished humble fingers set,

Each in a noon of its own infinite.

And here is leant the branch and its repose

of the deep leaf to the pilgrim plume. Repose,

Inflections brilliant and mute of the voyager, light!

And here the nests, and freshet throats resume

Notes over and over found, names

For the silvery ascensions of joy. Nothing is here

But moss and its bells now of the root’s night;

But the beetle’s bower, and arc from grass to grass

For the flight in gauze. Now its fresh lair,

Grass-deep, nestles the cool eft to stir

Vague newborn limbs, and the bud’s dark winding has

Access of day. Now on the subtle noon

Time’s image, at pause with being, labours free

Of all its charge, for each in coverts laid,

Of clement kind; and everlastingly,

In some elision of bright moments is known,

Changed wide as Eden, the branch whose silence sways

Dazzle of the murmurous leaves to continual tone;

Its separations, sighing to own again

Being of the ignorant wish; and sways to sight,

Waked from it nighted, the marvelous foundlings of light;

Risen and weaving from the ceaseless root

A divine ease whispers toward fruitfulness,

While all a summer’s conscience tempts the fruit.

Copyright Credit: Léonie Adams, “The Summer Image” from Poems: A Selection (New York: The Noonday Press, 1959). Used by permission of Judith Farr, Literary Executrix of the Estate of Léonie Adams.

Source: Poems: A Selection (The Noonday Press, 1959)