_That which is known has value only by virtue of the dark. This cannot be otherwise. A thing known passes out of the mind into the muscles, the will is quit of it, save only when set into vibration by the forces of darkness opposed to it._ XXIII. 1 Baaaa! Ba-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha! _Bebe esa purga._ It is the goats of Santo Domingo talking. _Bebe esa purga!_ Bebeesapurga! And the answer is: _Yo no lo quiero beber!_ Yonoloquierobeber! * * * * * _It is nearly pure luck that gets the mind turned inside out in a work of art. There is nothing more difficult than to write a poem. It is something of a matter of slight of hand. The poets of the T’ang dynasty or of the golden age in Greece or even the Elizabethans: it’s a kind of alchemy of form, a deft bottling of a fermenting language. Take Dante and his Tuscan dialect— It’s a matter of position. The empty form drops from a cloud, like a gourd from a vine; into it the poet packs his phallus-like argument._ 2 The red huckleberry bushes running miraculously along the ground among the trees everywhere,   except where the land’s tilled, these keep her from that tiredness the earth’s touch lays up under the soles of feet. She runs beyond the wood   follows the swiftest along the roads   laughing among the birch clusters   her face in the yellow leaves   the curls before her eyes   her mouth half open. This is a person in particular   there where they have her—and I have only a wraith in the birch trees. * * * * * _It is not the lusty bodies of the nearly naked girls in the shows about town, nor the blare of the popular tunes that make money for the manager. The girls can be procured rather more easily in other ways and the music is dirt cheap. It is that this meat is savored with a strangeness which never looses its fresh taste to generation after generation, either of dancers or those who watch. It is beauty escaping, spinning up over the heads, blown out at the overtaxed vents by the electric fans._ 3 * * * * *