the crossroad seems wide open to you
and there a four-faced janus watches
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
in the brown baked features
the eyes of a familiar compound ghost
both intimate and unidentifiable
and do not think of the fruit of action
and the time of death is every moment
which shall fructify in the lives of others 'on whatever sphere of being
the mind of a man may be intent
at the time of death' - that is the one action
a dignified and commodious sacrament
that the future is a faded song, a royal rose or a lavender spray
of wistful regret for those who are not yet here to regret,
pressed between yellow leaves of a book that has never been opened
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
costing not less than everything
a condition of complete simplicity
i do not know much about gods useful, untrustworthy, as a conveyor of commerce then only a problem confronting the builder of bridges
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
not admiration or victory
but simply to be accepted
as part of an undeniable reality,
like stones and trees
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 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 all these are usual
pastimes and drugs, and features of the press
but this is the nearest, in place and time,
now and in england
dying is a habit
that's well-known to many
on the money'
on a halcyon day it is merely a monument,
in navigable weather it is always a seamark
to lay a course by, but in the sombre season
or the sudden fury, is what it always was
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 latter a partial fallacy
encouraged by superficial notions of evolution,
which becomes, in the popular mind, a means of disowning the past accompanies you
since that one night or evening lost
in time now, on which your restless
eyes first deciphered her forever
in a garden or patio turned to dust
misquoting virgil
when christ has judged me
who knows what they'll see
and the rest
is prayer, observance, discipline, thought and action so krishna, as when he admonished arjuna
on the field of battle
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 to start again
what one had expected
a periphrastic study in a worn-out poetical fashion,
leaving one still with the intolerable wrestle
with words and meanings
you'll not be seen to visit that well
under white sun or yellow moon
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
what
are you here?
let them be
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 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
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
they know me well who surround me here,
know well my afflictions and weakness
the dry salvages - presumably les trois sauvages - is a small
group of rocks, with a beacon, off the n
on the money' dying is a habit
that's well-known to many
a symbol perfected in death
tendril and spray
clutch and cling?