You gently yawned and stacked away your plate.We heard the wind. We heard it rush and throw480 Twigs at the windowpane. Phone ringing? No.I helped you with the dishes. The tall clockKept on demolishing young root, old rock.
“Midnight,” you said. What’s midnight to the young?And suddenly a festive blaze was flungAcross five cedar trunks, snowpatches showed,And a patrol car on our bumpy roadCame to a crunching stop. Retake, retake!
People have thought she tried to cross the lakeAt Lochan Neck where zesty skaters crossed490 From Exe to Wye on days of special frost.Others supposed she might have lost her wayBy turning left from Bridgeroad; and some sayShe took her poor young life. I know. You know.
It was a night of thaw, a night of blow,With great excitement in the air. Black springStood just around the corner, shiveringIn the wet starlight and on the wet ground.The lake lay in the mist, its ice half drowned.A blurry shape stepped off the reedy bank500 Into a crackling, gulping swamp, and sank.
Canto three
L’if, lifeless tree! Your great Maybe, Rabelais:The grand potato.The grand potato. I. P. H., a layInstitute (I) of Preparation (P)For the Hereafter (H), or If, as weCalled it – big if! – engaged me for one termTo speak on death (“to lecture on the Worm,”Wrote President McAber).Wrote President McAber).You and I,And she, then a mere tot, moved from New WyeTo Yewshade, in another, higher state.510 I love great mountains. From the iron gateOf the ramshackle house we rented thereOne saw a snowy form, so far, so fair,That one could only fetch a sigh, as ifIt might assist assimilation.It might assist assimilation. IphWas a larvorium and a violet:A grave in Reason’s early spring. And yetIt missed the gist of the whole thing; it missedWhat mostly interests the preterist;For we die every day; oblivion thrives520 Not on dry thighbones but on blood-ripe lives,And our best yesterdays are now foul pilesOf crumpled names, phone numbers and foxed files.I’m ready to become a floweretOr a fat fly, but never, to forget.And I’ll turn down eternity unlessThe melancholy and the tendernessOf mortal life; the passion and the pain;The claret taillight of that dwindling planeOff Hesperus; your gesture of dismay530 On running out of cigarettes; the wayYou smile at dogs; the trail of silver slimeSnails leaves on flagstones; this good ink, this rhyme,This index card, this slender rubber bandWhich always forms, when dropped, an ampersand,Are found in Heaven by the newlydeadStored in its strongholds through the years. Stored in its strongholds through the years. InsteadThe Institute assumed it might be wiseNot to expect too much of paradise:What if there’s nobody to say hulloTo the newcomer, no reception, no540 Indoctrination? What if you are tossedInto a boundless void, your bearings lost,Your spirit stripped and utterly alone,Your task unfinished, your despair unknown,Your body just beginning to putresce,A non-undressable in morning dress,Your widow lying prone on a dim bed,Herself a blur in your dissolving head!
While snubbing gods, including the big G,550 Iph borrowed some peripheral debrisFrom mystic visions; and it offered tips(The amber spectacles for life’s eclipse) —How not to panic when you’re made a ghost:Sidle and slide, choose a smooth surd, and coast,Meet solid bodies and glissade right through,Or let a person circulate through you.How to locate in blackness, with a gasp,Terra the Fair, an orbicle of jasp.How to keep sane in spiral types of space.560 Precautions to be taken in the caseOf freak reincarnation: what to doOn suddenly discovering that youAre now a young and vulnerable toadPlump in the middle of a busy road,Or a bear cub beneath a burning pine,Or a book mite in a revived divine.
Time means succession, and succession, change:Hence timelessness is bound to disarrangeSchedules of sentiment. We give advice570 To widower. He has been married twice:He meets his wives; both loved, both loving, bothJealous of one another. Time means growth,And growth means nothing in Elysian life.Fondling a changeless child, the flax-haired wifeGrieves on the brink of a remembered pondFull of a dreamy sky. And, also blond,But with a touch of tawny in the shade,Feet up, knees clasped, on a stone balustradeThe other sits and raises a moist gaze580 Toward the blue impenetrable haze.How to begin? Which first to kiss? What toyTo give the babe? Does that small solemn boyKnow of the head-on crash which on a wildMarch night killed both the mother and the child?And she, the second love, with instep bareIn ballerina black, why does she wearThe earrings from the other’s jewel case?And why does she avert her fierce young face?
For as we know from dreams it is so hard590 To speak to our dear dead! They disregardOur apprehension, queaziness and shame —The awful sense that they’re not quite the same.And our school chum killed in a distant warIs not surprised to see us at his door,And in a blend of jauntiness and gloomPoints at the puddles in his basement room.
But who can teach the thoughts we should roll-callWhen morning finds us marching to the wallUnder the stage direction of some goon600 Political, some uniformed baboon?We’ll think of matters only known to us —Empires of rhyme, Indies of calculus;Listen to distant cocks crow, and discernUpon the rough gray wall a rare wall fern;And while our royal hands are being tied,Taunt our inferiors, cheerfully derideThe dedicated imbeciles, and spitInto their eyes just for the fun of it.Nor can one help the exile, the old man610 Dying in a motel, with the loud fanRevolving in the torrid prairie nightAnd, from the outside, bits of colored lightReaching his bed like dark hands from the pastOffering gems; and death is coming fast.He suffocates and conjures in two tonguesThe nebulae dilating in his lungs.