Clunky, but has potential. I’ll probably return to this idea another time.

Deconstruction

Just a branch or two tremor
--or should that be tremble?—
it’s hard to know the proper word,
so many to defy conventions with.

"The rainbow crossarchangeled the retirement-home-wall sky"

looks promising, but will anyone get that:

• "cross" started the whole thing, "crossed the sky"…
• made me think of crossword, but crosswords are perpendicular, which a rainbow is not
• so, "cross arc" solved that problem, a rainbow being an arc
• It’s also an “arch,” and of course I think of “archangel,” because
• arch and arch aren’t pronounced the same, which tickles me, and
• I liked the idea of an angel holding up a rainbow, and
• angel sounds like "angle," referring back to crossword puzzle geometry.
• Thus "crossarchangel," which confers other possible meanings on the rainbow. It could be "cross," i.e. angry. It could be a chief (or high) rainbow.
• Never mind whether any reader will calculate that "retirement-home-wall" is a substitute for "gray."

And this doesn’t account for wrong—intentionally—grammar.

A verb by any other word would speed as sweet(ly).

We have lived like civilized people.
O ruins, traditions!

And we have seen the barbarians,
breakers of sculpture and glass.

And now we talk of 'the inner life',
and I ask myself, where is it?

Not here, in these streets and houses,
so I think it must be found

in indolence, pure indolence,
an ocean of darkness,

in silence, an arm of the moon,
a hand that enters slowly.

         *  *  *
I am reminded of a story
Camus tells, of a man in prison camp.

He had carved a piano keyboard
with a nail on a piece of wood.

And sat there playing the piano.
This music was made entirely of silence.

--1969

The house was quiet and the world was calm.
The reader became the book; and summer night

Was like the conscious being of the book.
The house was quiet and the world was calm.

The words were spoken as if there was no book,
Except that the reader leaned above the page,

Wanted to lean, wanted much most to be
The scholar to whom the book is true, to whom

The summer night is a perfection of thought.
The house was quiet because it had to be.

The quiet was part of the meaning, part of the mind:
The access of perfection to the page.

And the world was calm. The truth in a calm world,
In which there is no other meaning, itself

Is calm, itself is summer and night, itself
Is the reader leaning late and reading there.

1947