RESOLUTIONS OF A COMMITTEE

...next, we resolve to use no more, except as a plaything,
any poetic mask or vestment; never to stand
before footlights - and least in grief or love, since nothing
is worth much weeping-for, unless perhaps everything; and
few things worth praising but those we insult by praise.
Though ritual mask and robe are worn by the magician
in his blood-painted zodiac, summoned power obeys
only the blood itself - the blood and the ambition:
we choose the other and the living, organ or flower,
in truth of self, to conjure-with (never the pleated
cloth of sham poppies, not the tin dancer, nor the sweet-sour
breath of old vases, or old satins, long vacated).

Therefore: resolved that knowing is to be undressed; and then
the naked mystery under the familiar garment
be caged in words, for singing; and the garrulous pen
be made a needle, to record it without comment.
Let all observations marry the daughters of music,
and reason take the colours of the colibri:
wise rainbows in the perspex of a metaphysic,
to shine and sing between planets, or in the sea.
For only the Aurora is the air of magic,
and only magic the proper body of intellect:
all else unmakes the poem, bridebed of wonder and logic,
the childing double splendour of prism and star-elect.

Resolved moreover that we the resolvers, we alone, 
bear the gold wands of makars, the white swords of critics:
we pick no quarrel with incantation, with wit, with bone - 
- lipped thesis, or with madness, or with mathematics;
though we dislike, we scorn to condemn, the man
who faces carious ruin with continual stucco:
for we contain all failures; we are their sum, which can
forgive its tinted fossil or its quavering echo.
But we resolve - and this is our last resolution
as poets with one voice - that the committee adjourn,
singly, to virginal wrestling for its own possession
of the lunar nine-quetzal-clad Muses, and their return.