a whistling buoy
but i cannot say where
a periphrastic study in a worn-out poetical fashion,
leaving one still with the intolerable wrestle
with words and meanings
but that which is only living
can only die
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
useful, untrustworthy, as a conveyor of commerce
and the rest
is prayer, observance, discipline, thought and action
no occupation either, but something given
and taken, in a lifetime's death in love,
ardour and selflessness and self-surrender
see, they return, and bring us with them 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
the dry salvages - presumably les trois sauvages - is a small
group of rocks, with a beacon, off the n
which shall fructify in the lives of others
and do not think of the fruit of action
and the time of death is every moment 'on whatever sphere of being
the mind of a man may be intent
at the time of death' - that is the one action
while the world moves
in appetency, on its metalled ways
of time past and time future
this is the one way, and the other
is the same, not in movement
but abstention from movememnt
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
not admiration or victory
but simply to be accepted
as part of an undeniable reality,
like stones and trees
the crossroad seems wide open to you
and there a four-faced janus watches
space, time and borges now leaving me
all who have loved me and forgotten
the evening with the photograph album
the latter a partial fallacy
encouraged by superficial notions of evolution,
which becomes, in the popular mind, a means of disowning the past
the backward look behind the assurance
of recorded history, the backward half-look
over the shoulder, towards the primitive terror
so krishna, as when he admonished arjuna
on the field of battle
or
watching the furrow that widens behind you,
you shall not think
not escaping from the past
into different lives, or into any future
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
the past is finished
the future is before us 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
every phrase and every sentence is an end and a beginning,
every poem an epitaph
but this is the nearest, in place and time,
now and in england
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 you'll not be seen to visit that well
under white sun or yellow moon
on the money'
dying is a habit
that's well-known to many
although we were not
now they are paolo, francesca,
not two friends who are sharing
the savour of a fable
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
and those who saw them off have left the platform their faces relax from grief into relief,
to the sleepy rhythm of a hundred hours
wait without love,
for love would be love of the wrong thing
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
there is yet faith
but the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting
so the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing
i am not eager to rehearse
my thoughts and theory which you have forgotten
and he
neither daylight
investing form with lucid stillness
turning shadow into transient beauty
with slow rotation suggesting permanence
nor darkness to purify the soul
emptying the sensual with deprivation
cleansing affection from the temporal
each
joining a neighbor, as though speech
were a still performance
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 in the brown baked features
the eyes of a familiar compound ghost
both intimate and unidentifiable figlia del tuo figlio,
queen of heaven
they will be in another, greater,
but what can that matter to them
see, they depart, and we go with them
when christ has judged me
who knows what they'll see
where is there and end to the drifting wreckage,
the prayer of the bone on the beach, the unprayable
prayer at the calamitous annunciation?
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