Mortal oddment, there’ s no wish in the blood
But beat, but stay gift-strong, but make demands
To keep within veins this ore’ s diffuse gold,
These voices that know without being known —
These voices that riddle thought with herself,
Ridicule thought in her flimsy eternal
Gowns a child can tear in half with a breath —
That chorus arterial, unbribable,
Blowing song through self as a child blows
A dandelion apart —
All those weeds? —
In the suburbs on a bike path that in
any other age would be a road roughed
halfway through some dark wood’ s listening heart
two damp young men in suits sucked dry of light
walk stiffly and uncertain round a bend
in each left hand the black box of a book
They see me then spread out to fill the way
as sun blares down and dry May wind slaps
cheap loose plastic cloth against their shins
The thinner taller blond one greets me in
an earnest tone these days not often heard
and when I do not take his offered hand
The alternative to flying is cowardice,
And what is said against it excuses, excuses;
Its want was always heavy in those men’ s bodies
Who foresaw it in some detail; and failing that,
The rest were shown through its skyey heats and eases
In sleep, awoke uncertain whether their waking cry
Had been falling fear only, or love and falling fear.
When the sudden way was shown, its possibility
In terms of the familiar at last shown,
(How absurdly simple the principle after all!)
Any tyrant should have sensed it was controversial:
It stops the town we come through. Workers raise
Their oily arms in good salute and grin.
Kids scream as at a circus. Business men
Glance hopefully and go their measured way.
And women standing at their dumbstruck door
More slowly wave and seem to warn us back,
As if a tear blinding the course of war
Might once dissolve our iron in their sweet wish.
Stand to one side. No, over here with me:
out of the light but out of darkness too,
where everything that is not odd or old
is gold and subjugates the shadows. There,
now you will be no trouble and behold none —
anything but trouble, at first glance,
last chance to see what I say is worth a look.
Ash and strewments, the first moth-wings, pale
Ardour of brief evenings, on the fecund wind;
Or all a wing, less than wind,
Breath of low herbs upfloats, petal or wing,
Haunting the musk precincts of burial.
For the season of newer riches moves triumphing,
Of the evanescence of deaths. These potpourris
Earth-tinctured, jet insect-bead, cinder of bloom —
PART I
I
In a far country, and a distant age,
Ere sprites and fays had bade farewell to earth,
A boy was born of humble parentage;
The stars that shone upon his lonely birth
Did seem to promise sovereignty and fame —
Yet no tradition hath preserved his name.
It is a place whither I’ ve often gone
For peace, and found it, secret, hushed, and cool,
A beautiful recess in neighboring woods.
Trees of the soberest hues, thick-leaved and tall,
Arch it o’ erhead and column it around,
Framing a covert, natural and wild,
Domelike and dim; though nowhere so enclosed
But that the gentlest breezes reach the spot
Unwearied and unweakened. Sound is here
A transient and unfrequent visitor;
Yet if the day be calm, not often then,
Whilst the high pines in one another’ s arms
Three days I heard them grieve when I lay dead,
(It was so strange to me that they should weep!)
Tall candles burned about me in the dark,
And a great crucifix was on my breast,
And a great silence filled the lonesome room.
All afternoon the shadows have been building
A city of their own within the streets,
Carefully correcting the perspectives
With dark diagonals, and paring back
Sidewalks into catwalks, strips of bright
Companionways, as if it were a ship
This counter-city. But the leaning, black
Enjambements like ladders for assault
Scale the façade and tie them to the earth,
Confounding fire-escapes already meshed
In slatted ambiguities. You touch
The sliding shapes to find which place is which
