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
they know me well who surround me here,
know well my afflictions and weakness
not admiration or victory
but simply to be accepted
as part of an undeniable reality,
like stones and trees
no occupation either, but something given
and taken, in a lifetime's death in love,
ardour and selflessness and self-surrender
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 whistling buoy
dying is a habit
that's well-known to many on the money' and that is where we start
neither from nor towards at the still point, there the dance is,
but neither arrest nor movement
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 but which
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
the backward look behind the assurance
of recorded history, the backward half-look
over the shoulder, towards the primitive terror
humility is endless
but this is the nearest, in place and time,
now and in england 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
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
in the brown baked features
the eyes of a familiar compound ghost
both intimate and unidentifiable
but the agony abides
and never know that we are gone
they'll long outlast our oblivion
fare forward, you who think that you are voyaging
though not to the ear,
the murmuring shell of time, and not in any language
you are not those who saw the harbour
receding, or those who will disembark the communication
of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living
the day was breaking
and he a face still forming
yet the words sufficed
to compel the recognition they preceded
so krishna, as when he admonished arjuna
on the field of battle
so the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing
you would have to put off
sense and notion
where is there and end to the drifting wreckage,
the prayer of the bone on the beach, the unprayable
prayer at the calamitous annunciation?
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
a condition of complete simplicity
costing not less than everything
dying is a habit
that's well-known to many
on the money'
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
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
a symbol perfected in death
i may not comprehend, may not remember
beneath the bleeding hands we feel
the sharp compassion of the healer's art
resolving the enigma of the fever chart
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
human kind
cannot bear very much reality
where every word is at home,
taking its place to support the others,
the word neither diffident nor ostentatious,
an easy commerce of the old and the new,
the common word exact without vulgarity,
the formal word precise but not pedantic,
the complete consort dancing together
every phrase and every sentence is an end and a beginning,
every poem an epitaph
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
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 pools where it offers to our curiosity
the more delicate algae and the sea anemone
the starfish, the horseshoe crab, the whale's backbone