and that is where we start tendril and spray
clutch and cling? for liberation - not less of love but expanding
of love beyond desire, and so liberation
from the future as well as the past
the evening with the photograph album
involved with past and future
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 and the time of death is every moment
and do not think of the fruit of action
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
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 no wind, but pentecostal fire
in the dark time of the year
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?
at the still point, there the dance is,
but neither arrest nor movement
neither from nor towards
not admiration or victory
but simply to be accepted
as part of an undeniable reality,
like stones and trees each
joining a neighbor, as though speech
were a still performance
i may not comprehend, may not remember
the shame
of things ill done and done to others' harm
which once you took for exercise of virtue
a symbol perfected in death
a dignified and commodious sacrament
where is there and end to the drifting wreckage,
the prayer of the bone on the beach, the unprayable
prayer at the calamitous annunciation?
they will be in another, greater,
but what can that matter to them
when christ has judged me
who knows what they'll see
attachment to self and to things and to persons, detachment
from self and from things and from persons
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
see, they depart, and we go with them in the brown baked features
the eyes of a familiar compound ghost
both intimate and unidentifiable
are you here?
what and the ground swell, that is and was from the beginning,
clangs
the bell
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
the latter a partial fallacy
encouraged by superficial notions of evolution,
which becomes, in the popular mind, a means of disowning the past
a condition of complete simplicity costing not less than everything
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 silence already filled with noises,
a canvas on which emerges
a chorus of smiles, a winter morning
dying is a habit
that's well-known to many
on the money'