but which
that i've walked
already one last time, indifferently
and without knowing it, submitting
to one who sets up omnipotent laws
and a secret and a rigid measure
for the shadows, the dreams, and forms
that work the warp and weft of this life
tendril and spray
clutch and cling?
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 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
thus said the wise merlin
to die is to have been born
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 dry salvages - presumably les trois sauvages - is a small
group of rocks, with a beacon, off the n
space, time and borges now leaving me
all who have loved me and forgotten
figlia del tuo figlio,
queen of heaven
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
while the world moves
in appetency, on its metalled ways
of time past and time future
this is the one way, and the other
is the same, not in movement
but abstention from movememnt
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
on the money' dying is a habit
that's well-known to many
fare forward, you who think that you are voyaging
you are not those who saw the harbour
receding, or those who will disembark
though not to the ear,
the murmuring shell of time, and not in any language
but i cannot say where
the first snow will fall
america waits for me on every street,
but i feel in the decline of evening
today so long, and yesterday so brief
they say 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 attachment to self and to things and to persons, detachment
from self and from things and from persons or when, under ether, the mind is conscious but conscious of nothing-
i said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope
for hope would be hope for the wrong thing
there is yet faith
but the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting
wait without love,
for love would be love of the wrong thing
and the rest
is prayer, observance, discipline, thought and action
where is there and end to the drifting wreckage,
the prayer of the bone on the beach, the unprayable
prayer at the calamitous annunciation?
release omens
by sortilege, or tea leaves, riddle the inevitable
with playing cards, fiddle with pentagrams
or barbituric acids, or dissect
the recurrent image into pre-conscious terrors-
to explore the womb, or tomb, or dreams
and always will be, some of them especially
whether on the shores of asia, or in the edgware road,
men's curiosity searches past and future
and clings to that dimension
all these are usual
pastimes and drugs, and features of the press humility is endless
their faces relax from grief into relief,
to the sleepy rhythm of a hundred hours and those who saw them off have left the platform
and never know that we are gone
they'll long outlast our oblivion
in the brown baked features
the eyes of a familiar compound ghost
both intimate and unidentifiable
the latter a partial fallacy
encouraged by superficial notions of evolution,
which becomes, in the popular mind, a means of disowning the past
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
the starfish, the horseshoe crab, the whale's backbone
beneath the bleeding hands we feel
the sharp compassion of the healer's art
resolving the enigma of the fever chart they will be in another, greater,
but what can that matter to them
but the agony abides neither from nor towards
at the still point, there the dance is,
but neither arrest nor movement no wind, but pentecostal fire
in the dark time of the year
and under the oppression of the silent fog
the tolling bell
measures time not our time, rung by the unhurried
ground swell, a time
older than the time of chronometers, older
than time counted by anxious worried women
lying awake, calculating the future,
trying to unweave, unwind, unravel
and piece together the past and the future,
between midnight and dawn, when the past is all deception,
the future futureless, before the morning watch
whem time stops and time is never ending
the whine in the rigging,
the menace and caress of wave that breaks on water,
the distant rote in the granite teeth,
and the wailing warning form the approaching headland
are all sea voices, and the heaving groaner
rounded homewards, and the seagull
and the ground swell, that is and was from the beginning,
clangs
the bell