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
all who have loved me and forgotten
space, time and borges now leaving me
a whistling buoy
in the brown baked features
the eyes of a familiar compound ghost
both intimate and unidentifiable
the backward look behind the assurance
of recorded history, the backward half-look
over the shoulder, towards the primitive terror
the communication
of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living
humility is endless
each
joining a neighbor, as though speech
were a still performance
a periphrastic study in a worn-out poetical fashion,
leaving one still with the intolerable wrestle
with words and meanings
and he a face still forming
yet the words sufficed
to compel the recognition they preceded
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
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 misquoting virgil 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
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
wait without love,
for love would be love of the wrong thing
there is yet faith
but the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting
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
but the agony abides although we were not
you would have to put off
sense and notion 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
are you here?
what
now there are red houses side by side
and the delicate bronze of the leaves
and chaste winter and pious wood
the shame
of things ill done and done to others' harm
which once you took for exercise of virtue
they have found one another
and the rest
is prayer, observance, discipline, thought and action
the evening with the photograph album
they know me well who surround me here,
know well my afflictions and weakness
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
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
beneath the bleeding hands we feel
the sharp compassion of the healer's art
resolving the enigma of the fever chart
now they are paolo, francesca,
not two friends who are sharing
the savour of a fable 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
a dignified and commodious sacrament
but this is the nearest, in place and time,
now and in england
and that is where we start and the time of death is every moment
'on whatever sphere of being
the mind of a man may be intent
at the time of death' - that is the one action
and do not think of the fruit of action
which shall fructify in the lives of others
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 silence already filled with noises,
a canvas on which emerges
a chorus of smiles, a winter morning
the patient is no longer here
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
then only a problem confronting the builder of bridges
i do not know much about gods useful, untrustworthy, as a conveyor of commerce
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
every phrase and every sentence is an end and a beginning,
every poem an epitaph
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 neither from nor towards
at the still point, there the dance is,
but neither arrest nor movement
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 day was breaking
so the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing
and now, under conditions
that seem unpropitious
you'll not be seen to visit that well
under white sun or yellow moon
they will be in another, greater,
but what can that matter to them
whether, or not, due to misunderstanding,
having hoped for the wrong things or dreaded the wrong things,
is not in question are likewise permanent
with such permanence as time has