and the rest
is prayer, observance, discipline, thought and action
what one had expected
to start again 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
the pools where it offers to our curiosity
the more delicate algae and the sea anemone
are you here? what
which shall fructify in the lives of others and the time of death is every moment
and do not think of the fruit of action
'on whatever sphere of being
the mind of a man may be intent
at the time of death' - that is the one action 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
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 whistling buoy
involved with past and future
now there are red houses side by side
and the delicate bronze of the leaves
and chaste winter and pious wood
to die is to have been born
thus said the wise merlin
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
dying is a habit
that's well-known to many
on the money'
space, time and borges now leaving me
all who have loved me and forgotten
are likewise permanent
with such permanence as time has
whether, or not, due to misunderstanding,
having hoped for the wrong things or dreaded the wrong things,
is not in question
the evening with the photograph album
and now, under conditions
that seem unpropitious
but this is the nearest, in place and time,
now and in england
although we were not
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
they know me well who surround me here,
know well my afflictions and weakness
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
human kind
cannot bear very much reality they have found one another
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
where is there and end to the drifting wreckage,
the prayer of the bone on the beach, the unprayable
prayer at the calamitous annunciation?
each
joining a neighbor, as though speech
were a still performance
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
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 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
the patient is no longer here
so krishna, as when he admonished arjuna
on the field of battle
their faces relax from grief into relief,
to the sleepy rhythm of a hundred hours
and those who saw them off have left the platform
humility is endless
the latter a partial fallacy
encouraged by superficial notions of evolution,
which becomes, in the popular mind, a means of disowning the past
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
no wind, but pentecostal fire
in the dark time of the year they will be in another, greater,
but what can that matter to them
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?
they say
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
but the agony abides
i may not comprehend, may not remember
you would have to put off
sense and notion
the communication
of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living
in the brown baked features
the eyes of a familiar compound ghost
both intimate and unidentifiable
this is the one way, and the other
is the same, not in movement
but abstention from movememnt while the world moves
in appetency, on its metalled ways
of time past and time future
i gaze but don't understand
it's as if they were strangers now they are paolo, francesca,
not two friends who are sharing
the savour of a fable 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
attachment to self and to things and to persons, detachment
from self and from things and from persons