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
a whistling buoy but i cannot say where
tendril and spray
clutch and cling?
yet the words sufficed
to compel the recognition they preceded
and he a face still forming
the wonder that i feel is easy,
yet ease is cause of wonder
we had the experience but missed the meaning,
and approach to the meaning restores the experience
in a different form, beyond any meaning
we can assign to happiness
when christ has judged me
who knows what they'll see
they'll long outlast our oblivion
and never know that we are gone
to start again
what one had expected
the crossroad seems wide open to you
and there a four-faced janus watches
you'll never see the bright moon again,
you've now achieved the unalterable
sum of moments granted you by fate
i gaze but don't understand
it's as if they were strangers
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
they will be in another, greater,
but what can that matter to them
the evening with the photograph album
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
a symbol perfected in death
the dry salvages - presumably les trois sauvages - is a small
group of rocks, with a beacon, off the n
where is there and end to the drifting wreckage,
the prayer of the bone on the beach, the unprayable
prayer at the calamitous annunciation?
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? that their merely being there
means something
that soon
we may touch, love, explain
but the agony abides they know me well who surround me here,
know well my afflictions and weakness
see, they return, and bring us with them
not admiration or victory
but simply to be accepted
as part of an undeniable reality,
like stones and trees
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
figlia del tuo figlio,
queen of heaven
a periphrastic study in a worn-out poetical fashion,
leaving one still with the intolerable wrestle
with words and meanings
though not to the ear,
the murmuring shell of time, and not in any language
fare forward, you who think that you are voyaging
you are not those who saw the harbour
receding, or those who will disembark
involved with past and future
so the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing
the communication
of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living
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
driven by daemonic, chthonic
powers
the shame
of things ill done and done to others' harm
which once you took for exercise of virtue
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 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
and the ground swell, that is and was from the beginning,
clangs
the bell
in the brown baked features
the eyes of a familiar compound ghost
both intimate and unidentifiable
each
joining a neighbor, as though speech
were a still performance
no wind, but pentecostal fire
in the dark time of the year
who are only undefeated
because we have gone on trying
not too far from the yew-tree the life of significant soil
we, content at the last
if our temporal reversion nourish
let them be
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
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
you are not the same people who left that station
or who will arrive at any terminus,
while the narrowing rails slide together behind you
the future is before us not escaping from the past
into different lives, or into any future
the past is finished
or
watching the furrow that widens behind you,
you shall not think