all these are usual
pastimes and drugs, and features of the press
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
human kind
cannot bear very much reality
dying is a habit
that's well-known to many
on the money'
the evening with the photograph album
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
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
neither from nor towards
at the still point, there the dance is,
but neither arrest nor movement
although we were not but that which is only living
can only die 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?
in the brown baked features
the eyes of a familiar compound ghost
both intimate and unidentifiable
the shame
of things ill done and done to others' harm
which once you took for exercise of virtue
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
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
and he a face still forming
yet the words sufficed
to compel the recognition they preceded
beneath the bleeding hands we feel
the sharp compassion of the healer's art
resolving the enigma of the fever chart
tendril and spray
clutch and cling? not as making a trip that will be unpayable
for a haul that will not bear examination
no wind, but pentecostal fire
in the dark time of the year
'on whatever sphere of being
the mind of a man may be intent
at the time of death' - that is the one action
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
they have found one another
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
the starfish, the horseshoe crab, the whale's backbone
costing not less than everything
a condition of complete simplicity
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
when christ has judged me
who knows what they'll see
the latter a partial fallacy
encouraged by superficial notions of evolution,
which becomes, in the popular mind, a means of disowning the past
all who have loved me and forgotten
space, time and borges now leaving me
a periphrastic study in a worn-out poetical fashion,
leaving one still with the intolerable wrestle
with words and meanings
figlia del tuo figlio,
queen of heaven
what are you here?
a whistling buoy
for liberation - not less of love but expanding
of love beyond desire, and so liberation
from the future as well as the past the crossroad seems wide open to you
and there a four-faced janus watches a dignified and commodious sacrament and the rest
is prayer, observance, discipline, thought and action
the patient is no longer here
to die is to have been born
thus said the wise merlin
you'll not be seen to visit that well
under white sun or yellow moon the communication
of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living
you are not those who saw the harbour
receding, or those who will disembark
fare forward, you who think that you are voyaging
though not to the ear,
the murmuring shell of time, and not in any language
i may not comprehend, may not remember
now there are red houses side by side
and the delicate bronze of the leaves
and chaste winter and pious wood
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
so the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing humility is endless
not escaping from the past
into different lives, or into any future
the future is before us
you are not the same people who left that station
or who will arrive at any terminus,
while the narrowing rails slide together behind you
watching the furrow that widens behind you,
you shall not think
the past is finished
or