I sing of him whose heart had hung...<\/h2>\n\r\nI sing of him whose heart had hung\r\n Above all struggle or wonder\r\n Of our broken woes. Far oh far\r\nBeyond our little lays he'd sung.\r\n\r\nYet here's no death, no reason, and\r\n No loss. No loss? No loss but less\r\n Of friendship than I'd lief confess,\r\nA faded castle, fallen sand\r\n\r\nBuilt up upon imperfect hope\r\n Toward another sky. Lost, the dream;\r\n Lost the meaning once deemed more firm,\r\nThe promise more than swami's rope.\r\n\r\nWe'd had heaven's ascent held fast:\r\n What we'd reared in reckless dawn\r\n As though God's own brave secret shown,\r\nLooms a gibbet now dawn is past\r\n\r\nAnd sunless exile welcomes me.\r\n\r\nI craned from pole to pole, with pale<\/span>\r\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/gregglory.com\/images\/departed_friend_div.gif\")
. . . <\/font><\/h2>\r\nI craned from pole to pole, with pale\r\n Hurrying ear I sought the sound\r\n Of a friendship I had unfound,\r\nLost in the maelstrom, in the gale. \r\n\r\nA song no longer sung, but known\r\n Down in where the singing starts, soft\r\n As an infant's finger held aloft\r\nTo hold where the wild wind had blown.\r\n\r\nWhere my limb was cut there grew\r\n A pain; where my shadow'd followed soft\r\n No image of myself now crossed.\r\nWhat I was was lost, was through.\r\n\r\nNo zone of knowledge could commend\r\n Discovery of how I'd begun\r\n Nor tell me if I'd lost or won\r\nIn this struggle without end.\r\n\r\nNow I knew I was lost; lost.\r\n Uncentered in the storm that blew\r\n Through all that was of me, all through.\r\nLost is what I was-- at last, at last.\r\n\r\nIs it a death to know you gone<\/span>\r\n. . . <\/font><\/h2>\r\nIs it a death to know you gone,\r\n Separation's wail at the verge\r\n Where tide on tide may pile and merge\r\nWhile I sigh unsolaced, alone?\r\n\r\nIt is death, or death's live semblance\r\n To trade high love for sorrow's hole,\r\n To peer in pits for the absent soul,\r\nBraver laughter, a brother's glance.\r\n\r\nYet others before have I lost,\r\n Their unsyllabled all made death's,\r\n Pilfered lives that in coffins rest,\r\nNor can I reckon up the cost.\r\n\r\n \r\n\r\nAnd, yet, I've reconciled such loss<\/span>\r\n. . . <\/font><\/h2>\r\nAnd, yet, I've reconciled such loss,\r\n Made grief my dish and my dessert,\r\n And lived to love again and cry hurt,\r\nHeedless of my passive loss.\r\n\r\nThe hearse triumphal in the rain\r\n And heaven all one weltered bruise\r\n That threatens tears, nor offers dews,\r\nTakes hope from throats, gives hymns of pain.\r\n\r\nThe author's pen cannot note the deed\r\n That seared the author into ash;\r\n He only sings how feels the lash:\r\nThe sting, the wet, the heat, the need.\r\n\r\nI found little upon my mount<\/span>\r\n. . . <\/font><\/h2>\r\nI found little upon my mount\r\n That mattered, neither goods nor goal;\r\n Sharp hurt came sharp upon my soul:\r\nA little arrow; it little meant.\r\n\r\nMy eyes centered where they were sent,\r\n Zeroed on that nothing 'All.'\r\n Some nadir in the sphere, some pall\r\nKept light from my looking yet.\r\n\r\nI was the shadow cast down at noon,\r\n Crushed by the heel that casts it;\r\n Weary of my little life unlit,\r\nThe dark I knew knew I was no one.\r\n\r\nWhen a friend departs the sunny vale,\r\n When a cloud rolls over the hill,\r\n When water past pebbles ribs and spills,\r\nWhen sun beyond one sunset sails,\r\n\r\nWhose grief shall give that going song?\r\n Whose voice vaunt such diminishment?\r\n Whose richness re-give what had been lent?\r\nWhose keen increase such goodness gone?\r\n\r\nWhen I am of my little life<\/span>\r\n. . . <\/font><\/h2>\r\nWhen I am of my little life\r\n Bereft, and my soul in plumes\r\n Of darkness goes, as through a catacomb,\r\nNone I leave behind in life\r\n\r\nShall weep as I have wept.\r\n For I have known my second soul,\r\n A far braver, brighter soul,\r\nThat looked within me, turned, and left.\r\n\r\nTo rob a grave not yet stuffed<\/span>\r\n. . . <\/font><\/h2>\r\nTo rob a grave not yet stuffed\r\n With friendship, only full of woe\r\n For one no longer friend or foe\r\nOr anything, though breath still puffs,--\r\n\r\nAnd somewhere past horizons dim\r\n He lives on like a mute reproach\r\n In caustic quiet, silently loath\r\nTo burst with bounty I need from him.\r\n\r\nUnanswering wall, unhuman hate\r\n --Or so I paint him, as I must,\r\n Who have no knowing from old trust,\r\nAs though Christ transfigured my Greek fate.\r\n\r\nI stand before the empty hole\r\n I lay myself within the dirt\r\n I say a prayer for my hurt\r\nTo maggots, and my breath is stale.\r\n\r\nIf I were all of misery made\r\n And could confound my final hour\r\n With a tear, then no more power\r\nWould he have than a shade.\r\n\r\nInstead there's lodged the sovereign sting\r\n Of hope betrayed, hope that will not\r\n Die, though hope's death and gory rot\r\nWould stop the hole of my being.\r\n\r\nHope that thrives in everything alive<\/span>\r\n. . . <\/font><\/h2>\r\nHope that thrives in everything alive\r\n Susceptible to inward gusts\r\n And outward groans and manly 'musts,'\r\nHope that moves what cannot move or strive\r\n\r\nKeeps crimsons bright around my wound,\r\n That will not heal or cleave to kill;\r\n Damnation is: I was born to feel.\r\nHope bathes these horrors with new words.\r\n\r\nStill, if he comes, even to curse\r\n The whole acquaintanceship of our days,\r\n No growling hour's pinched of praise\r\nSave when absence is our discourse.\r\n\r\nCome again, thou ravaging tide\r\n Who had a slope of easy friendship,\r\n A lope like a gull, a lazy hip,\r\nTill you rolled away and tore my side.\r\n\r\nWhat resolution will recompense<\/span>\r\n. . . <\/font><\/h2>\r\nWhat resolution will recompense\r\n His companions for the pang\r\n Of his departure? What chimed gong\r\nWill make his going make new sense?\r\n\r\nHow after harrowed grief resolve\r\n To live whole again? Does the leaf\r\n Shorn from the trunk that gave belief\r\nEver re-ascend to former love?\r\n\r\nHere's no parable to mumble;\r\n We make our dying sounds above\r\n The grave that garners all our love:\r\nThe open door unable\r\n\r\nTo accommodate return.\r\n Let us gather where we are blown;\r\n Let us hold what we do not own\r\nBut a moment, and make return.\r\n\r\nHow many hours had snow blown<\/span>\r\n. . . <\/font><\/h2>\r\nHow many hours had snow blown\r\n In at the unattended window,\r\n Snowing in to no more be snow,\r\nTo flood the floor like thoughts none own?\r\n\r\nAn echo came beyond the fall\r\n Of welcome foot or voice gone now;\r\n I followed soft to the night lawn\r\n--The street was empty, and the long hall.\r\n\r\nAn ache beneath the pain of years<\/span>\r\n. . . <\/font><\/h2>\r\nAn ache beneath the pain of years\r\n Brings pang and poignancy to the fore;\r\n What I feel was felt before\r\nDear earth brought forth her sufferers.\r\n\r\nAs when a dove shakes off the rain\r\n Whisking silver mists to haloes\r\n Suspended in cool fogs of woe,\r\nThus softly I stand in shine and pain.\r\n\r\nTold I would not come to be beloved<\/span>\r\n. . . <\/font><\/h2>\r\nTold I would not come to be beloved\r\n I cried an unrecovered tear;\r\n Told 'death' was all I had to fear,\r\nI wept; wept to be so beloved.\r\n\r\nTo've been in wind and run in sun,\r\n To've slept in shadelight til all's one,\r\n Doubling frolic with unbecome,\r\nIs love enough when day is done.\r\n\r\nIf all into oblivion\r\n The body goes, trailing gestures\r\n Of absent soul in redder rose,\r\nI'm content to have once begun.\r\n\r\nNothing did as I did expect.\r\n No quiet council of surmise\r\n Left me other than most unwise;\r\nA life grown rich in retrospect.\r\n\r\nWhen the briar brave entwines my grave<\/span>\r\n. . . <\/font><\/h2>\r\nWhen the briar brave entwines my grave,\r\n And heart, kept cold, is fallow laid\r\n Beneath the green and twisted braid\r\nWhat rose will come to show me saved?\r\n\r\nWhat rose from all the horrored heart\r\n Will fly harried from the dour hole?\r\n What emblem of the buried soul\r\nWill rise to tell my harrowed part?\r\n\r\nIf twixt rounds of panting fight or dance\r\n All is 'catch our breaths' to kill again\r\n And love is all love unspoken\r\nWe're but two tigers in a trance\r\n\r\nWho pace and leer and wait to leap\r\n Who've lungs for roar yet none for love;\r\n Who toy and tear the departing dove\r\nAnd too late let our anger sleep.\r\n\r\nThe book is closed and sleep has come<\/span>\r\n. . . <\/font><\/h2>\r\nThe book is closed and sleep has come\r\n To lie beside me as I lay\r\n Thoughtless at the end of thoughtless day,\r\nA blessing of oblivion.\r\n\r\nI dropped the book that had told me: read,\r\n That had made a wonted offer\r\n As if neither knew the better:\r\nKnowledge is sorrow, living or dead.\r\n\r\nThe mind too worn by day's report,\r\n The day too wronged by mind's own war,\r\n Apprehensions made real by fears\r\nThat had lain still in latent thought\r\n\r\nNow wild as waking woes\r\n Ascend to startle sleep itself\r\n And mold from nothing nightmare's self;\r\nWith silent step they come by ones:\r\n\r\nWind at the casement inks with creaks\r\n What I had kept in lightest sketch,\r\n Through all the day of 'do' and 'fetch'--\r\nWind at the casement makes bold and bleak.\r\n\r\nPale and leery, alone in bed;\r\n Alone in bed, pale and leery,\r\n Unawake and lively-weary,\r\nI hear a tune that tums with dread.\r\n\r\nThe untended hurt, pushed away\r\n By strong strife of mind all day\r\n Tweaks and twinges as I lay;\r\nA small voice says what it has to say.\r\n\r\nForgotten friend! forgot beyond<\/span>\r\n. . . <\/font><\/h2>\r\nForgotten friend! forgot beyond\r\n The soul of solace in the cold,\r\n Friend whose tale is yet untold\r\nResurrect! and before me stand.\r\n\r\nLet memory chalice the ghost\r\n Spilled to rumors beyond recall;\r\n He lives yet, he did not fall,\r\nYet his bodying has no host.\r\n\r\nWhat is this absent creature then\r\n Who lives to others, shares their views\r\n Of russet sunsets, yet eschews\r\nThe gravid face of his old friend?\r\n\r\nDamned by discord, torn in twain,\r\n Yet present to the fervid pitch\r\n Of inner sense, a lively nothing which\r\nMakes all mem'ry the mem'ry of pain.\r\n\r\nReveal! From shadow, gloom and gloam\r\n Stand forth! and be again alive;\r\n Here, where your memory still thrives,\r\nYour dear self has yet a home.\r\n\r\nWhen the windowpane fills with light<\/span>\r\n. . . <\/font><\/h2>\r\nWhen the windowpane fills with light\r\n Sepulchral as a ghastly sail\r\n Full of dead wind that will not fail\r\nDespite the dark, despite the night,\r\n\r\nAnd skin and breath half swell with sweat--\r\n Though in itself that has not been\r\n My own experience of sin--\r\nSome knot inside the soul relents....\r\n\r\nThere in the insistent mist\r\n A burning mast in a gull-grey shroud\r\n Churns water and divides the cloud\r\nAnd rides the tide as I did insist.\r\n\r\nBe you friend or be you fear,\r\n Palely limber in the halflight,\r\n Almost fiction in false midnight,\r\nStand pale beside my bed, be near.\r\n\r\nWhat you have to say, I would hear\r\n Who, rash and rough in life before,\r\n Sent from out this very door\r\nYour solider emissary.\r\n\r\nWait, ghost, do not fade or fail!\r\n What you speak I will not unsay\r\n But hold in holy memory;\r\nI would hear, would feel, your tale.\r\n\r\nVoiceless the vision vanishes<\/span>\r\n. . . <\/font><\/h2>\r\nVoiceless the vision vanishes,\r\n An untenanted guest again\r\n Far gone along the moonlit plain,\r\nSourceless as our dearest wishes.\r\n\r\nI stand untongued beneath the blank,--\r\n At the balustrade, I reach for dark,\r\n See nothing there to hand me back\r\nThe loss of hope that's left me blank.\r\n\r\nPiteous moon, shed tearlike light\r\n On those who live below the clouds,\r\n On us who circle in our shrouds,\r\nThough no thing's worth its being bright.\r\n\r\nBetter still that grief... grief has come\r\n And tears the hair and scrapes the eye,\r\n Better we ourselves should wish to die\r\nThan no feeling at all should come.\r\n\r\nIn my heart, a false fable starts<\/span>\r\n. . . <\/font><\/h2>\r\nIn my heart, a false fable starts\r\n That 'tween two friends, so fair, so fast,\r\n No rill of envy could ever pass,\r\nNo trickle winter could make crack.\r\n\r\nOur summer was a million days\r\n That on two shared pulses shone;\r\n What was thought in the heart of one\r\nThe other's tongue found fit to praise.\r\n\r\nAutumn's harvests had us chasing feasts\r\n In distant dales neither knew;\r\n The same sun and moon we saw\r\nOverlooked our separate trysts.\r\n\r\nDecember should have seen us come\r\n Sharing triumphs round the table\r\n Laughter-laden as a fable,\r\nStrong in joy to a single home.\r\n\r\nToo-far our wayfaring had swum,\r\n Crests and valleys and the green roar\r\n Held us apart forevermore,\r\nDerelict, adrift, who had clung.\r\n\r\nIron frost the great granite breaks,\r\n Too-cold sap splits the broadest tree\r\n In solemn singularity;\r\nAlone falls the proudest rock.\r\n\r\nIf some grave power left us here<\/span>\r\n. . . <\/font><\/h2>\r\nIf some grave power left us here,\r\n Solitary seekers in the night,\r\n Lonely voyeurs of the light,\r\nShall we blaspheme what strength appears?\r\n\r\nFar better, broader, more intense\r\n To see the sign of good in things;\r\n Amid haphazard waywardings,\r\nLove what loveliness may commence.\r\n\r\nIf ever a bright butterfly\r\n Has brought you unsuspected joy\r\n Neath the canopy dark destroys,\r\nBless its shimmer and bless that sky.\r\n\r\nIf ever before brown defeat\r\n Some glower gives some hint of glow,\r\n Or all you are's not all you know,\r\nListen still to that heart, that beat.\r\n\r\nIf ever when wind's against us\r\n Snarling sails that'd happily snapped\r\n You feel amidst the clip and clap\r\nOne soft kiss blow, then don't resist.\r\n\r\nIf higher than twin towers' crowns\r\n Your hopes have ever heralded\r\n Only to be trapped back and barred\r\nFrom achievement and from renown,\r\n\r\nListen still to what hope had heard,\r\n Lift aloft for the light you saw\r\n In premonition of your fall;\r\nSeek heaven though it be in shards.\r\n\r\nMore lies in our looking there\r\n With lovely eyes, tho' full of cares,\r\n With hearts that have not ceased to share,\r\nMore of consequence than despair.\r\n\r\nThough parted by pernicious fate<\/span>\r\n. . . <\/font><\/h2>\r\nThough parted by pernicious fate\r\n And left no solace when you left,\r\n By your absence of solace bereft,\r\nYet still I loiter by the gate,\r\n\r\nLooping hopes on echoes cool and slow\r\n Of your departure seasons past;\r\n When you went, you went at last\r\nBy going where you had to go.\r\n\r\nStill I beside the gate am left,\r\n Still I lean and lick the dust;\r\n Still I wait, as still I must\r\nUntil some change unpains my breast.\r\n\r\nThe agile curfews of the night\r\n That wipe away the palest day\r\n And light's burning words lightly unsay\r\nCannot cross out what you left bright.\r\n\r\nThe moon that trod old empires down\r\n Or saw two loves woo, two loves despair\r\n Casts no changeful spell on my care\r\nThat carves the ages on my brow.\r\n\r\nElectra longs for her lone ideal<\/span>\r\n. . . <\/font><\/h2>\r\nElectra longs for her lone ideal\r\n Impatient with passion on her stoop,\r\n Unarmed before the vicious troop,--\r\nCries from poor girl's woe for her weal.\r\n\r\nAntigone, tender to her core,\r\n Going round and round in grief\r\n Mills herself but sad relief:\r\nTo kill the state with grief too pure.\r\n\r\nWhat value vaunts from remorse, or worse?\r\n Justice, with adamantine edge\r\n Turns crystal from a shaken tear\r\nSolidified from sighs, or worse.\r\n\r\nIn a breast gone god-abandoned\r\n What good does grief reveal?\r\n What idol does a tear revere?\r\nI have not earned what rosaries condone.\r\n\r\nNever another lie to 'get along,'\r\n To manipulate the powerless,\r\n To add confusion to their duress;\r\nNever deception from the strong,\r\n\r\nNever after venial convenience to strive\r\n But all must be benign transparency\r\n And facts alone the obduracy.\r\nI resolve to struggle and to live\r\n\r\nWith difficult fact and effortful truth.\r\n\r\nI looked at life through stainless panes<\/span>\r\n. . . <\/font><\/h2>\r\nI looked at life through stainless panes.\r\n My friend and I then grew rife\r\n And in clumsy love had strife:\r\nLife's transparency in the littered lane\r\n\r\nLay sharded. Never again\r\n Would sky suspend its peerless blue\r\n As though some heaven loved we two,\r\nFor we two loved without sin.\r\n\r\nEach sweet self-enmansioned soul\r\n Came to battle in dire array\r\n But would not fight, yet would not stay\r\n--And each departed for obscurer goals.\r\n\r\nWhat finer, more enlightened path\r\n Might Life lend our wandering ways\r\n Than sheltered friendship as a stay\r\nAgainst galled wounds that make us wroth?\r\n\r\nWhat against gauche chance may make amends?\r\n What but friendship has the power\r\n To wipe the brow in feverous hour--\r\nWhat else may ease us ere the end?\r\n\r\nNothing else has friendship's function\r\n Nor can solace the absent pain\r\n Of friendship gone, not come again,\r\nFriendship faded to a fiction.\r\n\r\nEchoes of some diviner love<\/span>\r\n. . . <\/font><\/h2>\r\nEchoes of some diviner love\r\n Reverberate a quartered heart\r\n Confusing fonted loves with lower wants,\r\nDonning longing robes of doves.\r\n\r\nThere is something then in something gone,\r\n A talisman to shake again\r\n The index of eternal pain;\r\nA hole in every good thought won.\r\n\r\nThe grief, the grief is fresh to me\r\n As yestereve when enduing mist\r\n All the upswayed landscape kissed,\r\nShowing in shining deep tears unseen.\r\n\r\nCan friendship live when friend has left<\/span>\r\n. . . <\/font><\/h2>\r\nCan friendship live when friend has left,\r\n When keel and sail are rudely stripped,\r\n A smiling skull without the lips,\r\nLove of its softness unpossessed?\r\n\r\nWhat new faces shall my face seek\r\n That found these fellow faces false?\r\n What mirror mimics faces lost?\r\nWhat redemption beyond such breaks?\r\n\r\nDoes that departed friend, unseen,\r\n Unknown and homeless who's home's in me,\r\n Stop his step and think what we\r\nOnce were, on all that once had been?\r\n\r\nThen politics spilt its dirty milk<\/span>\r\n. . . <\/font><\/h2>\r\nThen politics spilt its dirty milk\r\n And still its deadly little tread\r\n Marches across my wounded head,\r\nItching the sutures though of silk.\r\n\r\nAs though one caustic loss, relentless\r\n In its riptide on my pride\r\n Were not hurt enough, my side\r\nWas laved in vinegar and piss.\r\n\r\nThe hand that'd helped now held my throat\r\n As though to show me how naive\r\n One ever was to believe\r\nIn friendship's blotting antidote.\r\n\r\nSo he fingered his own quaint cause\r\n Until his heats gave fervid birth\r\n To a dogmatic cross unearthed,\r\nA cross whose crosshairs sought my source.\r\n\r\n\r\nEnemies made by mild reproach<\/span>\r\n. . . <\/font><\/h2>\r\nEnemies made by mild reproach\r\n Never twice discover love\r\n (Like God, gone missing from above)\r\nSince the sin itself was mild enough.\r\n\r\nSo I stare and swear in lonely rooms\r\n Filibustering dust bunnies,\r\n Each summation a swift surmise,\r\nReadjusting juries in the gloom.\r\n\r\nThere is no answering passion\r\n In fractious pastimes of the mind\r\n Twirling and untwirling twine\r\nWhile sown unseen grow meaning's lesions.\r\n\r\nI am a shadow in a weft\r\n Of darks, a nullity who his own\r\n Nullity long long has known,\r\nAnd now no nothing here is left. \r\n\r\nLife's a marble in a bowl<\/span>\r\n. . . <\/font><\/h2>\r\nLife's a marble in a bowl: \r\n All agony but a rolling chance,\r\n The bullfight no longer a dance\r\nOf misdirection toward a goal.\r\n\r\nLife's a story with no moral;\r\n Condensation's circles yet\r\n No ring of meaning can beget.\r\nRace to rail against the choral\r\n\r\nLoves hossannaed by the mass\r\n Of men, who see their circle\r\n Flout timid time and weary wrinkle,\r\nWhose dreams go buried by the grass.\r\n\r\nKnow that your own nothingness\r\n A nothingness stays, a felt\r\n Backdrop or dead pelt\r\nStroked by hands half calluses.\r\n\r\nThere's no lesson to be learned\r\n From all the tarnished marvel\r\n Of our mayhem, still the larval\r\nStage of chaos for we damned.\r\n\r\nImpotent in the pouring wrack\r\n Of disaster's icy hail\r\n Stripping deep with red-hot flails\r\nSplintered skin that'd been my back.\r\n\r\nI stand in draining anger,\r\n Half-aghast to understand\r\n Myself am likewise but a man\r\nDreaming Fate is not a stranger.\r\n\r\nWas it for those echoes alone<\/span>\r\n. . . <\/font><\/h2>\r\nWas it for those echoes alone\r\n That your proud shout came and went,\r\n That my near airs with your name were rent?\r\nWas purpose pipping in the bone\r\n\r\nEre clear breakage lamed the story,\r\n Castling attacks to faulty defense,--\r\n Recovery all the recompense\r\nFor our having augured glory?\r\n\r\nUnsmiling in slings and crutches,\r\n Fools blown brown by windy time\r\n Who'd been sheer kings of summertime\r\nGrimacing at lightest touches.\r\n\r\nSolemn cort\u00e8ge of cannons mum\r\n Roll evermore in breakless line:\r\n Wavy Life a funereal sine\r\nUnending, and airless, and come.\r\n\r\nTacit disaster's stripped to trim belief,\r\n Memory turned to slave to serve\r\n The forward unknowns of our curve;\r\nThis is given with what gives grief.\r\n\r\nYou have moved in love to others<\/span>\r\n. . . <\/font><\/h2>\r\nYou have moved in love to others,\r\n To new unnull pursuits you go\r\n In restless faith those whiter flows\r\nFollow you to fuller waters.\r\n\r\nMy faith's poorer, my grasp infirm\r\n Upon the tugging rudder\r\n That guides me to my uttermost;\r\nI fear I sail far more in harm\r\n\r\nThan in health. Where is your dear hand\r\n Steady on the trembling tiller?--\r\n Steering clear to vaster endeavors\r\nBeyond horizons, past sight of land.\r\n\r\nWhere I go's no more than where I am,\r\n Nor faith nor hope proffer roses\r\n To blank the claims of fear's supposes,\r\nOr dare me greater be than man.\r\n\r\nMay bride and child and wealth be yours\r\n And all the winnings dreams suggest,--\r\n If I were but an infrequent guest\r\nI'd deem myself the treasurer.\r\n\r\n. . . <\/font><\/h2>\r\n<\/pre>\n <\/p>\n
The Departed Friend<\/h2>\n\r\nEven now the wrestling winter wind\r\nStruggles in the window's flaw\r\nAnd the charity of the sun is given over\r\nTo night's empty menace. My fingers\r\nIn sympathy with the very ice\r\nWhiten and grow longer atop my coverings,\r\nHoisting the sheet simply as a wave.\r\nWind at the casement inks with creaks\r\nWhat I had kept in lightest sketch,\r\nRounding to flesh with roars and moans\r\nWhat I had kept in a whispering skull,\r\nDawn to dusk inside my soul,\r\nKept locked below some workaday hum\r\nWhose once-amusing tune now tums in dread.\r\n\r\nHow can the body breathe when no hope gusts through,\r\nPanicking the shutters to the outward sky?\r\nSo my body and my bed lay together stacked,\r\nMortised mates: the cadaver and mortician's table.\r\nSo I lay at the nadir-bottom of my thoughts\r\nThat had been high bearers-up before,--\r\nFrothy self-involving silvered clouds\r\nRadiant as watered stones in moonshine;\r\nNow down in the sultry sinkhole bottom\r\nOf a stirless pool no unburdening breeze will bless,\r\nOver-crowed by moss-black cypress trees\r\nDripping no redemption from their dank,\r\nSo I lay, as now I lie in mental projection:\r\nIn the reeking warp and bursting of my coffin-box.\r\n\r\nHere, in the mire, my meaning is near\r\nMy hidden wish insists I miss him,\r\nCause and consoler of my misery!\r\nA foulish pool of moonlight at my feet\r\nShifts and shapes into his living shadow,\r\nA sad long form too full of thought;\r\nI stare into the abyss that I have brought.\r\n\r\nI cannot speak, weak ghost, frail light\r\nOvermastering me! All my mind's\r\nBut memory of our untold hopes!\r\nShape of my friend who shaped me so!\r\nDear ghost, do not go, but let me rehearse\r\nOur storied history to your toneless face;\r\nFace whiter than the day gone blind.\r\n\r\nMany hours had we trod the wood, near twins,\r\nIn each other's sidewise countenance\r\nDiscerning ourselves! After a little onward way\r\nAt a fenny brook stopped up we stopped\r\nRestoring its foot-light laughter to the wood\r\nThat under many an autumn's confusion of leaves\r\nHad clotted to brown silence. Heave\r\nOf hands as wet as their work, as cold unfrozen\r\nAs vapored breath! At the stoppage's heart\r\nIn the very bolus of the blockage's glut\r\nA dead raven wormed, fat with drowned maggots\r\nEating the mealy flesh that could no longer\r\nHold the wetted velvet of its feathers together.\r\nIts dead eye was as sunken as the pit\r\nWhere we buried it. An office of farewell\r\nPerformed perforce in mutual accord\r\nAs like our old friendship together then\r\nAs unlike our alien parting now,\r\nNever vetted in the abstraction of a vow.\r\n\r\nVengeance and ire are exiles to this mood\r\nThat even in the hurricano's house\r\nLeave their livid imprints. Oh ghost\r\nCalled up from the waterspout\r\nOf tears unwept and inly kept\r\nDeliver now no elegy of division\r\nThat sunders life from life\r\nAnd vanquishes the vivid phonemes of our dreams!\r\nO newly denuded world\r\nBereft of friendship and benefit\r\nShorn of scorn and sorrow both\r\nThat have no object on which to act!\r\n\r\nNo syllable will tell\r\nThe night hauntings your each look has cast\r\nDeep into the telling silence of my soul.\r\nMy soul! And what is that? A hollow word\r\nMore echoed out by poets than looked into.\r\nBut when at nighttime and for all the night\r\nI search the remorseful strains of memory\r\nTo find some babble that will heal\r\nBeside the note \"Forget\"-- that and that alone\r\nI say is soul-- the willful welding\r\nOf has been and is. If I could recall it all\r\nNeither in melancholy nor high-hearted joy\r\nAnd leave not one instant back to rot\r\nI'd count myself a thing beyond a day.\r\nHow often has the robin's song come to this sill\r\nAnd I noted it not? From that oblivion alone\r\nI begin. Her redbreast puffed with expectation\r\nAnd with mirth, and song trilled out as water\r\nSpilled serially over the serried rocks.\r\nFlow back up the stone along thou's song!\r\nLet memory's viol play you as a tune\r\nWorn true with loving,\r\nMade soft-edged by your worth, our youth.\r\n\r\nCommunal comminglings of sun and moon\r\nIf each were source and both reflectors.\r\nTo've shared what we have given!\r\nDay gathers day in its trooping hoop\r\nAnd rolls on, agile and endless.\r\nAlthough the spontaneous waterfall\r\nMay loiter at its foaming foot\r\nDistilling a stillness in the tumult's depth--\r\nEven so the swelling pool will whelm the lip\r\nIn moon as in noon, seeping the pristine banks\r\nIn affectionate and curious insistence.\r\nSo what we are flows to what\r\nWe must come to be, until our ruddy drops\r\nBeset the universal ocean, whelmed\r\nTo give, and give all, and end all giving.\r\n\r\nWhat cares the bee for the blossom's nuzzle?\r\nWhat cares she or knows she how her work\r\nIn honey laid shall see a spring\r\nThat she herself shall never know?\r\nStill the flower receives and the bee busily does\r\nWhatever whiteness the one or buzz the other,\r\nMutually do they do, and mutually know not.\r\nAnd yet, were they to know, to think, to care\r\nWhat pause would press between the passions\r\nOf their touch? What bee might meditate\r\nAlone and unpollinated on some barer branch?\r\nWhat flower shut to dawn its streaked pinks\r\nSo warmly showed to the showering rays before?\r\n\r\nThe mind remembers each tweet each note\r\nAnd each soberer lowing of tuba or bassoon\r\nNo matter how distant the conductor's commencing click\r\nMay seem to present ears and hearers.\r\nAll's memorial from the moment of its making\r\nTo its last, dashing regretful recall.\r\nNo matter how blithely frivolous we live\r\nOr howsoe'er delicate or fleet or half-materialized,\r\nHow subtle-soft, how hard to catch or kiss,\r\nHow almost nothing as a faded impulse unexplored--\r\nEach unknowing moment of our fluttering is\r\nIn amber laid.\r\n\r\nNow in my maturer melancholy\r\nI long for the native joyance of my youth:\r\nA sodden blossom beaten by the rain,\r\nI sprang to the sun at its first clearing,\r\nThe skyey vault light-washed as a robin's egg,\r\nI, who now am a rude sturdy twig froze round\r\nAs a hoop. Too many winters\r\nHas my heaven-intending form laid low,\r\nFrozen with distorted weight to whatever\r\nBrambles crawled along the ministering dirt.\r\nPhysician! How can I find the cure\r\nI knew so well when I did not know\r\nI knew it! Now within me still I sleep,\r\nA hibernate creature gone to moody caves,--\r\nAnd cave and creature both wander lost within me!\r\n\r\nI wander lost as Oedipus over earth, heartsore\r\nWhen his crimes had cracked him to his core.\r\nWavy lengths of my hair sweat matted\r\nTo my forehead, heavy with road-dust;\r\nHair this wild year had left unshorn,\r\nNumberless as the fruitless thoughts\r\nThat have pursued me-- my own phantom--\r\nAs when the mirror presses darkness on my eyes.\r\nStars of eve, once the ready angels\r\nOf my bedtime prayers, twinkling on my hopes\r\nIn looking wonder from the firmament,\r\nNow cast chilly chastisements on my course\r\nAnd make each way onward a mirror fouled\r\nBy the ignorant chance that moved me hence.\r\nOnward naught and rearward naught\r\nAnd oblivion within! In such state am I caught.\r\n\r\nI am christened \"Lost.\" My want of self\r\nHaunted memory returned re-cleared to me,\r\nAs when in a clearest pool silver-laden\r\nI saw what the world saw was me.\r\nAnd when some minor upset rolls the pool\r\nAnd puts the silver salver into sine\r\nThat self may still be seen in highlights and lows\r\nDistorted but unbroken as it goes\r\nEven unto the edges in an ermine flash.\r\nBe it a leaf that loures upon the plane\r\nDone with autumnal ripening\r\nOr narcissistic lock let down\r\nFrom avid, too avid, self-scrutiny\r\nThe result is still\r\nThis unstillness and its bends.\r\n\r\nI stare at the soft frost edges of the room,\r\nA moody amanuensis to the moon\r\nUntil elegant as a weeping pine\r\nMy soul steps from its sleeping source\r\nAnd all the air is fraught with mist.\r\n\r\nThis image past of spirited play\r\nWavers in a mirror rude:\r\nSlipshod appraisal of apprentice days\r\nWhen love for love's sake came half-amazed\r\nAnd gazed the neighboring fence half-along\r\nStaring daisies into blotched sun-spots\r\nAnd not the bright warm things they were\r\nThemselves alone.\r\n\r\nA demarcation has occurred-- one unloves another.\r\nA \"cruel neglect and contemptuous silence ever since.\"\r\nHow can I respond to this new, denuded world?\r\n\r\nOh! Full many times I myself have seen\r\nThe glory's crown that old Coleridge taught--\r\nSelf-enhancing shadow of a thought--\r\nWhen round my fallen shadow's head\r\nA rainbow glory glowed in the snow\r\nAs I trudged with my sled up the steep\r\nTo the tipped top of the wintry hill\r\nReady to plunge again like thunder down\r\nInto the gulf from which I'd come.\r\n\r\nConvoys to their various destinies post\r\nFinding their ways as they make them\r\nAmid that startlement of the waves--\r\nAnd to find themselves have lost the fleet\r\nThat sent them seaward into mists,\r\nSharpest demarcation of their long self-pursuit.\r\nNow with more constant heart and firm resolve\r\nMy face may bear what winds upbraid me--\r\nOr is this but a lie I level at my will....\r\n\r\nThe ghost is vanished! The departed friend\r\nFiltered out the window without a syllable;\r\nI lift myself and follow to the frame.\r\nIs there some silver-tinged disturbance\r\nAdding its fretted lattice to the leaves\r\nOf the windy maples all about?\r\nI cannot speak so well as shout\r\nAnd fear my voice will only tell\r\nDead and final as a parting bell.\r\nTo the porch then-under stippled skies\r\nI feel the clear vigor of the cold\r\nWhere a thousand stars like errless watchers\r\nPin me to my outpost. There, there\r\nHope deludes me with a moment's wish;\r\nIt was perhaps some serried sound\r\nOf household dog turning round\r\nTo return to his hunter's sleep in peace.\r\nBut still some welling white is there\r\nBesides the moon's. I see it blur\r\nThe boldened boundary of the field\r\nCrowded with unfound flowers gone to weed.\r\nSome shape is there--oh surely there--\r\nNot all I know of one is departed yet\r\nStill some mere shred lingers to be loved\r\nAnd take of me forgiveness in the night.\r\n\r\nBlock all jealousies--all wrongs--all time\r\nBeside the moment we wear now,\r\nA gown new and mutable to our mutual need.\r\n--One moment's presence is all I ask!\r\n\"Come! Turn your back to me no more, come back!\" \r\nI cry and the cry is like a thundercrack\r\nInside my grieving skull. No more turn away!\r\nThis night shall be as first light and life\r\nCome from the most high into humanity--\r\nOnly let it touch what most remains\r\nOf what we are this instant. The silver swells\r\nAt the field's end, growing larger as my\r\nCharging heart! Ah yes! Companion prime\r\nOf hope and heart-high hero of my contemplation\r\nTurn to return! But wait! Tis gone, tis fled\r\nAll that was of brimming light has burst\r\nAnd the iron balustrade cuts into my striking thighs\r\nAnd the alien field lays darkened and undewed.\r\nThis single tear has dribbled down my face.\r\nOne friend one loss one parting!\r\nNot if all the world were mirror for our woes\r\nCould ten thousand lines tell the tale:\r\nHow heart is rent and soul must wail,\r\nHow in conversation with a blank\r\nThere is no love to conquer all our labors;\r\nAmelioration is stemmed, and dead's the tide\r\nThat had flooded all our flotsam and our hopes.\r\nNo expectation had been too heavy to be borne\r\nAlong the continual susurrations of such a main.\r\nDawn herself, and her twin, dusk,\r\nCame and went well-colored by the clarity and depth;\r\nThe clouds that cooled and shadowed us\r\nWere themselves sustained\r\nBy the liquid intercessions of watery faith.\r\n\r\nThe question of a quisling, of love\r\nLavished on a lesser thing, the friend departed\r\nWho had been Palestine, home returned\r\nAnd companion of adventure in a world of deeds,\r\nThis artificial death and detriment\r\nOf two who had been connected\r\nAt their very source!\r\nThe isolated echo made moody and alone\r\n--Gone the solidarity of arms embraced\r\nTwins insistent as the signal sun\r\nTo burn our beings brightly and as one.\r\n\r\nNow by sympathetic charm of grief\r\nAll friendship comes to this belief:\r\nThat those who now do love me well\r\nShall leave me soon in abandoned hell;\r\nLike a rosary I keep these words\r\nBeside me, counted close, and counted\r\nOver again in each hour that I mourn.\r\nVain words that rehearse this rose\r\nThat goes away the way the sunset goes.<\/em>\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
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