see, they return, and bring us with them
in spite of which we like to think
that we are sound, substantial flesh and blood-
again, in spite of that, we call this friday good
and the ground swell, that is and was from the beginning,
clangs
the bell
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
a periphrastic study in a worn-out poetical fashion,
leaving one still with the intolerable wrestle
with words and meanings
a silence already filled with noises,
a canvas on which emerges
a chorus of smiles, a winter morning
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
figlia del tuo figlio,
queen of heaven
but the agony abides
on the money' dying is a habit
that's well-known to many
you'll not be seen to visit that well
under white sun or yellow moon 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
at the still point, there the dance is,
but neither arrest nor movement neither from nor towards
the patient is no longer here
the shame
of things ill done and done to others' harm
which once you took for exercise of virtue
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
the wonder that i feel is easy,
yet ease is cause of wonder
the backward look behind the assurance
of recorded history, the backward half-look
over the shoulder, towards the primitive terror
and now, under conditions
that seem unpropitious 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
i do not know much about gods
the crossroad seems wide open to you
and there a four-faced janus watches
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
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
they know me well who surround me here,
know well my afflictions and weakness
i gaze but don't understand
it's as if they were strangers i may not comprehend, may not remember
all who have loved me and forgotten
space, time and borges now leaving me that soon
we may touch, love, explain
that their merely being there
means something
see, they depart, and we go with them
yet the words sufficed
to compel the recognition they preceded
and he a face still forming i am not eager to rehearse
my thoughts and theory which you have forgotten
and he
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
so krishna, as when he admonished arjuna
on the field of battle
a dignified and commodious sacrament
the dry salvages - presumably les trois sauvages - is a small
group of rocks, with a beacon, off the n
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 human kind
cannot bear very much reality
the evening with the photograph album
you would have to put off
sense and notion
but this is the nearest, in place and time,
now and in england
all these are usual
pastimes and drugs, and features of the press
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
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
and never know that we are gone
they'll long outlast our oblivion
who are only undefeated
because we have gone on trying
we, content at the last
if our temporal reversion nourish
not too far from the yew-tree the life of significant soil
they have found one another
driven by daemonic, chthonic
powers