You don’t need to read tarot cards to try to trace the way in which the death’s head endures, sticks to the salt that gathers on the rocks that are sometimes on the rivers edge and sometimes deep beneath the channel, depending on which era of accretion under reckoning. You step in that river once, the tumult comes and then the tremendum strikes and shimmers in the cold’s clamorous residue.

An apparition, convex for a moment but then regained, strutting up and down the ranks and urging them on to shed blood and pay out the last length of the mortal coil, sputtering like a leaky sieve until the last becalming moment of silence has come.

Colors presented, the march goes on. someone stands to the side, tosses seeds into the furrows that had been raked in their wake, and after the excessive spoils of the sun did their work, the leaves that emerged could be read to say:

Pound canceled in his own mind the disassociations that had been isolating fact from fact for centuries. To have closed the gap between mythology and botany is but one movement of the process; one way to read the Cantos is to go through noting the rest restoration relationships now thought to be discreet — the ideogrammatic method was invented for just this purpose. In Pound’s spatial sense of time the past is here, now; it’s invisibility is our blindness, not its absence. The 19th century had put everything against the scale of time and discovered that all behavior within time’s monolinear progress was evolutionary. The past was a graveyard, a museum. It was Pound’s determination to obliterate such a configuration of time and history, to treat what had become a world of ghosts as a world eternally present.