the trailing
consequence of further days and hours,
while emotion takes to itself the emotionless
years of living among the breakage
of what was believed in as the most reliable-
and therefore the fittest for renunciation
and he a face still forming yet the words sufficed
to compel the recognition they preceded
and the rest
is prayer, observance, discipline, thought and action
attachment to self and to things and to persons, detachment
from self and from things and from persons
and, growing between them, indifference
which resembles the others as death resembles life,
being between two lives - unflowering, between
the live and the dead nettle
see, they depart, and we go with them
the crossroad seems wide open to you
and there a four-faced janus watches
space, time and borges now leaving me
all who have loved me and forgotten
you'll not be seen to visit that well
under white sun or yellow moon
at the still point, there the dance is,
but neither arrest nor movement
neither from nor towards
each
joining a neighbor, as though speech
were a still performance
useful, untrustworthy, as a conveyor of commerce
but i think that the river
is a strong brown god - sullen, untamed and intractable,
patient to some degree, at first recognised as a frontier
i do not know much about gods
then only a problem confronting the builder of bridges
you'll never see the bright moon again,
you've now achieved the unalterable
sum of moments granted you by fate
but i cannot say where
the latter a partial fallacy
encouraged by superficial notions of evolution,
which becomes, in the popular mind, a means of disowning the past the taste of fruit, the taste of water,
that face returned to us in dream,
the first jasmine flowers of november,
the infinite yearning of the compass,
a book we thought forever lost,
the pulsing of a hexameter,
the little key that opens a house,
the smell of sandalwood or library,
the ancient name of a street,
the colourations of a map,
an unforeseen etymology,
the smoothness of a filed fingernail,
the date that we were searching for,
counting the twelve dark bell-strokes,
a sudden physical pain and never know that we are gone
they'll long outlast our oblivion but that which is only living
can only die
the shame
of things ill done and done to others' harm
which once you took for exercise of virtue
on the money'
dying is a habit
that's well-known to many
that their merely being there
means something
that soon
we may touch, love, explain
the dry salvages - presumably les trois sauvages - is a small
group of rocks, with a beacon, off the n
a condition of complete simplicity
costing not less than everything
and all shall be well and
all manner of thing shall be well
when the tongues of flames are in-folded
into the crowned knot of fire
and the fire and the rose are one
the communication
of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living
there is a time for building
and a time for living and for generation
and a time for the wind to break the loosened pane
and to shake the wainscot where the field-mouse trots
and to shake the tattered arras woven with a silent motto
the patient is no longer here
i am not eager to rehearse
my thoughts and theory which you have forgotten
and he
love is itself unmoving,
only the cause and end of movement,
timeless, and undesiring
except in the aspect of time
caught in the form of limitation
between un-being and being
the day was breaking
if i think of a king at nightfall,
of three men, and more, on the scaffold
and a few who died forgotten
in other places, here and abroad,
and of one who died blind and quiet,
why should we celebrate
these dead men more than the dying? the starfish, the horseshoe crab, the whale's backbone
the pools where it offers to our curiosity
the more delicate algae and the sea anemone
the sea is the land's edge also, the granite,
into which it reaches, the beaches where it tosses
its hints of earlier and other creation
let them be in spite of which we like to think
that we are sound, substantial flesh and blood-
again, in spite of that, we call this friday good
they will be in another, greater,
but what can that matter to them
to start again
what one had expected but the agony abides
at the source of the longest river
the voice of the hidden waterfall
and the children in the apple-tree
not known, because not looked for
but heard, half-heard, in the stillness
between two waves of the sea
i gaze but don't understand
it's as if they were strangers
you would have to put off
sense and notion
a periphrastic study in a worn-out poetical fashion,
leaving one still with the intolerable wrestle
with words and meanings
are likewise permanent
with such permanence as time has whether, or not, due to misunderstanding,
having hoped for the wrong things or dreaded the wrong things,
is not in question
they know me well who surround me here,
know well my afflictions and weakness
where is there and end to the drifting wreckage,
the prayer of the bone on the beach, the unprayable
prayer at the calamitous annunciation? neither daylight
investing form with lucid stillness
turning shadow into transient beauty
with slow rotation suggesting permanence
nor darkness to purify the soul
emptying the sensual with deprivation
cleansing affection from the temporal a symbol perfected in death
tendril and spray
clutch and cling? see, they return, and bring us with them