From website gregglory.com
Written by Gregg Glory (Gregg G. Brown)
The Departed Friend
Selections from an unfinished dialog
Abortions and Tortures
Innumerable inchoate feelings all seeking expression and definition contemporaneously are here encoded for the reader. But with myself, and with that art which I most highly value, understanding precedes expression if what is made is to be art at all. In these poems I was caught in a curiously Edenic mode. I was surrounded and imbued with a richness of griefs, and still had not one syllable to name them. I had all the full feeling a human art could cry to posses and none of the sensibility through which to express it. The chaos of my grief had borne its lapidary apple, but I had yet to eat of it and understand. Cynicism is the crassest shortcut between a full heart and an empty mind—empty but well-ordered. It is no coincidence that minimalism is the reigning contribution of the latter half of the 20th century to expression’s vocabulary. It is comprehension without being comprehensive; it comprehends through vital exclusion; it is a supreme form of denial and, as such, never makes a positive, uncynical stand, and can never be “proven” wrong. Invulnerable and vapid, its objects glare in diminished insistence. Ashamedly, I must say that this twerpy type of cynicism makes its debut in lines of what follows here as well. Mostly in the toothless conclusions of the poems there is the oversimplification of a scab, and not the long-thumbed memory of a scar. Perhaps the elision of a decade will help to sort my inner chaos into outer order; perhaps selective forgetting and cowardly crowding-out of old memories with new heartaches will perform the aesthetic grunt-work that poetry demands and that my sensibility exhorts. But oh how my heart cannot wait the decade out! Ruptured, not enraptured, I ululate before my auditors—more full of sighs than songs.
Gregg G Brown
Nov 2, 2004
The Departed Friend Style Notes
There are lots of questionmarks in these lines, as befits my ignorance. A friend of profoundly poetic tenor pointed out to me the other day that I also enjoy employing negative statements that imply or outline a positive poetic feeling. If I were to have written Hamlet, for instance,
To be or not to be, that is the question.
Might have sounded something like this instead:
Not to be or not not to be, is that the question?
In the poems that follow there is much that is doubted, and many an assertion will not come unattended by its qualifier. After all, what king would step forward into such august company as you yourself provide without his page? Good my page, let us go forth like Wenceslas and provide for our poor and hungry souls the wine and meat of poetry, cibum et vinum. Notwithstanding all the misfires and queries contained in here, I know with severe certainty, as if gripped by a divine hand of lightning, that the feeling is true.
I will not wait for some un-looked-for good to come, but will make my present its own sufficing memory.
Gregg G Brown
Jan 1, 2005
The Return
Pale and leery, alone in bed,
Alone in bed, pale and leery,
Unawake and lively-weary,
Selfless as coming slumber numb,
My speaking self a word of wind
Sighing simply "Nevermind"
Til I one nothing do become,
Selfless, single, pale and weary.
The slow lightning of moonrise,
The cloudscape depths of pearl,
Consecrate my mood and room,
Entomb me like a knight-at-arms,
Cross-handed, on his final pallet carved:
My feet in pale armor sheathed, setting forth
To no Jerusalem. Dead men wail
In the woeful wind that pushes
All aside from the frowning moon.
The moon in bone-blank vision nearing,
Cold and haughty, a dead man's face,
Through the pulled-back curtain shines
Pale and weary and alone.
The quiet casement looking in
Unquiet undream apprehends,
Forlorn beyond the memory of friends:
Here my human heart in dread
Lingers loath on what had been said.
How softly sounds the shell of sleep
Calling our visions to its verge
That had not otherwise been so deep;
How softly sounds the shell of sleep!
Traffic of splashes, remote yet near,
Small edges blent to one static shush
As even now the boat draws clear....
Softly, softly, Windemere.
When our causes, obscure as eddies,
At last had crested to their crisis,
I failed the fathoming! My love
I let recede when tolled the tide,
An unwinning and a winless game,
In violentest crash the green reef
Cracking, killing.
Hush! now the frowning moon's a man,
Shadow from wed shadow departing,
Nimble-light as moth-wings darting:
You come in sorrow into the room,
Ghost of exhausted meditations,
And at the bed's foot look sadly down,
All silvered-over as if in snow.
Dear live ghost of my living ghost,
Memory sacred, not serene!
Self-salving waters of the breast
That spill in richness mixed with dust,
Sigh your human blessing in the night!
Come, tears! Let your salt effluence
Replace the bitter pourings of the moon!
Here am I in my human minim,
Unperspectivized man
Too naked now to endure the cold
Howsoe'er endued with warmth
I once was.
Let salt pelt out salt til salt alone
Weeps into being our green souls.
The nightmare, the scar, is here, here.
Like a battery's pile grown large
With potential charge-- would but some salt water
Soak and connect their shocks!
Those memories are high-piled
That wait for charitable water
To flood from my unfortunate eyes--
Then-- oh what mystery and what light!
The shore recedes, and recedes the day,
Softly, softly in sweet delay
Until all shore is shorelessness
And a damping fog is in the eye
Turned outward-inward in the mist.
And then, what wetness?
Version incorporating Daniel J Weeks’ suggested cuts above.
Longer Version below.
The Return
Pale and leery, alone in bed,
Alone in bed, pale and leery,
Unawake and lively-weary,
Selfless as coming slumber numb,
My speaking self a word of wind
Sighing simply "Nevermind"
Til I one nothing do become,
Selfless, single, pale and weary.
The slow lightning of moonrise,
The cloudscape depths of pearl,
Consecrate my mood and room.
The moon entombs me like a knight-at-arms,
Cross-handed, on his final pallet carved:
My feet in pale armor sheathed, setting forth
To no Jerusalem. Dead men wail
In the woeful wind that pushes
All aside from the frowning moon.
The moon in bone-blank vision nearing,
Cold and haughty, a dead man's face,
Through the pulled-back curtain shines
Pale and weary and alone.
The quiet casement looking in
Unquiet undream apprehends,
Forlorn beyond the memory of friends:
Here my human heart in dread
Lingers loath on what had been said.
Oh! if only I then had known
How small my love for you has been!
And now this nightmare of regret
Feeds my lifeblood to the moon.
My sheeted semblance, silver-washed,
In blood or moonlight palely caught
Lies strict within my coffin-cot,
Strictly lies in dead regret.
How softly sounds the shell of sleep
Calling our visions to its verge
That had not otherwise been so deep;
How softly sounds the shell of sleep!
Traffic of splashes, remote yet near,
Small edges blent to one static shush
As even now the boat draws clear....
Softly, softly, Windemere.
When our causes, obscure as eddies,
At last had crested to their crisis,
I failed the fathoming! My love
I let recede when anger came,
An unwinning and a winless game,
In violentest crash the green reef
Cracking, killing.
Hush! now the frowning moon's a man,
Shadow from wed shadow departing,
Nimble-light as moth-wings darting:
You come in sorrow into the room,
Ghost of exhausted meditations,
And at the bed's foot look sadly down,
All silvered-over as if in snow.
Dear live ghost of my living ghost,
Memory sacred, not serene!
Now I alone endure the contumely cold
And taste recriminating bitterness;
Remorse, regret; words unshared though said,
Unphilosophic fiends!
Here am I in my human minim
Unperspectivized man
Too naked now to endure the cold
Howsoe'er endued with warmth
I once was.
Pale and leery, alone in bed,
Alone in bed, pale and leery,
Unawake and lively-weary,
Selfless as coming slumber numb,
My speaking self a word of wind
Sighing simply "Nevermind"
Til I one nothing do become,
Selfless, single, pale and weary.
Oh! that I had some moon-wroth tears
To say in silence what I fear
And feel! Had I inner rain enough
I never would have fallen from us
But ever-buoyant as our hopes
Would have known my own love enough!
Self-salving waters of the breast
That spill in richness mixed with dust,
Sigh your human blessing in the night!
Come, tears! Let your salt effluence
Replace the bitter pourings of the moon!
Let salt pelt out salt til salt alone
Weeps into being our green souls.
The nightmare, the scar, is here, here,
That I had pushed all day away
As a child will forget his own
Minor injustices at play.
Forget but not forgive! Myself
Self-damned, and now no tears will flow.
Like a battery's pile grown large
With potential charge-- would but some salt water
Soak and connect their shocks!
Those memories are high-piled
That wait for charitable water
To flood from my unfortunate eyes--
Then-- oh what mystery and what light!
The shore recedes, and recedes the day,
Softly, softly in sweet delay
Until all shore is shorelessness
And a damping fog is in the eye
Turned outward-inward in the mist.
And then, what wetness?
In Amber
I sing of him whose heart had hung
Above all struggle or wonder
Of our broken woes. Far oh far
Beyond our little lays he'd sung.
Yet here's no death, no reason, and
No loss. No loss? No loss but less
Of friendship than I'd lief confess,
A faded castle, fallen sand
Built up upon imperfect hope
Toward another sky. Lost, the dream;
Lost the meaning once deemed more firm,
The promise more than swami's rope.
We'd had heaven's ascent held fast:
What we'd reared in reckless dawn
As though God's own brave secret shown,
Looms a gibbet now dawn is past
And sunless exile welcomes me.
I craned from pole to pole, with pale
Hurrying ear I sought the sound
Of a friendship I had unfound,
Lost in the maelstrom, in the gale.
A song no longer sung, but known
Down in where the singing starts, soft
As an infant's finger held aloft
To hold where the wild wind had blown.
Where my limb was cut there grew
A pain; where my shadow'd followed soft
No image of myself now crossed.
What I was was lost, was through.
No zone of knowledge could commend
Discovery of how I'd begun
Nor tell me if I'd lost or won
In this struggle without end.
Now I knew I was lost; lost.
Uncentered in the storm that blew
Through all that was of me, all through.
Lost is what I was-- at last, at last.
Is it a death to know you gone,
Separation's wail at the verge
Where tide on tide may pile and merge
While I sigh unsolaced, alone?
It is death, or death's live semblance
To trade high love for sorrow's hole,
To peer in pits for the absent soul,
Braver laughter, a brother's glance.
Yet others before have I lost,
Their unsyllabled all made death's,
Pilfered lives that in coffins rest,
Nor can I reckon up the cost.
But, yet, I've reconciled such loss,
Made grief my dish and my dessert,
And lived to love again and cry hurt,
Heedless of my passive loss.
The hearse triumphal in the rain
And heaven all one weltered bruise
That threatens tears, nor offers dews,
Takes hope from throats, gives hymns of pain.
The author's pen cannot note the deed
That seared the author into ash;
He only sings how feels the lash:
The sting, the wet, the heat, the need.
I found little upon my mount
That mattered, neither goods nor goal;
Sharp hurt came sharp upon my soul:
A little arrow; it little meant.
My eyes centered where they were sent,
Zeroed on that nothing 'All.'
Some nadir in the sphere, some pall
Kept light from my looking yet.
I was the shadow cast down at noon,
Crushed by the heel that casts it;
Weary of my little life unlit,
The dark I knew knew I was no one.
When a friend departs the sunny vale,
When a cloud rolls over the hill,
When water past pebbles ribs and spills,
When sun beyond one sunset sails,
Whose grief shall give that going song?
Whose voice vaunt such diminishment?
Whose richness re-give what had been lent?
Whose keen increase such goodness gone?
When I am of my little life
Bereft, and my soul in plumes
Of darkness goes, as through a catacomb,
None I leave behind in life
Shall weep as I have wept.
For I have known my second soul,
A far braver, brighter soul,
That looked within me, turned, and left.
To rob a grave not yet stuffed
With friendship, only full of woe
For one no longer friend or foe
Or anything, though breath still puffs
And somewhere past horizons dim
He lives on like a mute reproach,
Caustic quiet, silently loath
To burst with bounty I need from him.
Unanswering wall, unhuman hate
---Or so I paint him, as I must,
Who have no knowing from old trust,
As though Christ transfigured my Greek fate.
I stand before the empty hole
I lay myself within the dirt
I say a prayer for my hurt
To maggots, and my breath is stale.
If I were all of misery made
And could confound my final hour
With a tear, then no more power
Would he have than a shade.
Instead there's lodged the sovereign sting
Of hope betrayed, hope that will not
Die, though hope's death and gory rot
Would stop the hole of my being.
Hope that thrives in everything alive
Susceptible to inward gusts
And outward groans and manly 'musts,'
Hope that moves what cannot move or strive
Keeps crimsons bright around my wound,
That will not heal or cleave to kill;
Damnation is: I was born to feel.
Hope bathes these horrors with new words.
Still, if he comes, even to curse
The whole acquaintanceship of our days,
No growling hour's pinched of praise
Save when absence is our discourse.
Come again, thou ravaging tide
Who had a slope of easy friendship,
A lope like a gull, a lazy hip,
Till you rolled away and tore my side.
What resolution will recompense
His companions for the pang
Of his departure? What chimed gong
Will make his going make new sense?
How after harrowed grief resolve
To live whole again? Does the leaf
Shorn from the trunk that gave belief
Ever re-ascend to former love?
Here's no parable to mumble;
We make our dying sounds above
The grave that garners all our love:
The open door unable
To accommodate return.
Let us gather where we are blown;
let us hold what we do not own
But a moment, and make return.
How many hours had snow blown
In at the unattended window
Snowing in to no more be snow,
To flood the floor like thoughts none own.
An echo came beyond the fall
Of welcome foot or voice gone now;
I followed soft to the night lawn
--The street was empty, and the long hall.
An ache beneath the pain of years
Brings pang and poignancy to the fore;
What I feel was felt before
Dear earth brought forth her sufferers.
As when a dove shakes off the rain
Whisking silver mists to haloes
Suspended in cool fogs of woe,
Thus softly I stand in shine and pain.
Told I would not come to be beloved
I cried an unrecovered tear;
Told 'death' was all I had to fear,
I wept; wept to be so beloved.
To've been in wind and run in sun,
To've slept in shadelight til all's one,
Doubling frolic with unbecome,
Is love enough when day is done.
If all into oblivion
The body goes, trailing gestures
Of absent soul in redder rose,
I'm content to have once begun.
Nothing did as I did expect.
No quiet council of surmise
Left me other than most unwise;
A life grown rich in retrospect.
When the briar brave entwines my grave,
And heart, kept cold, is fallow laid
Beneath the green and twisted braid
What rose will come to show me saved?
What rose from all the horrored heart
Will fly harried from the dour hole?
What emblem of the buried soul
Will rise to tell my harrowed part?
If twixt rounds of panting fight or dance
All is 'catch our breaths' to kill again
And love is all love unspoken
We're but two tigers in a trance
Who pace and leer and wait to leap
Who've lungs for roar yet none for love;
Who toy and tear the departing dove
And too late let our anger sleep.
The book is closed and sleep has come
To lie beside me as I lay
Thoughtless at the end of thoughtless day,
A blessing of oblivion.
I dropped the book that had told me: read,
That had made a wonted offer
As if neither knew the better:
Knowledge is sorrow, living or dead.
The mind too worn by day's report,
The day too wronged by mind's own war,
Apprehensions made real by fears
That had lain still in latent thought
Now wild as waking woes
Ascend to startle sleep itself
And mold from nothing nightmare's self;
With silent step they come by ones:
Wind at the casement inks with creaks
What I had kept in lightest sketch,
Through all the day of 'do' and 'fetch'
Wind at the casement makes bold and bleak.
Pale and leery, alone in bed;
Alone in bed, pale and leery,
Unawake and lively-weary,
I hear a tune that tums with dread.
The untended hurt, pushed away
By strong strife of mind all day
Tweaks and twinges as I lay;
A small voice says what it has to say.
Forgotten friend! forgot beyond
The soul of solace in the cold,
Friend whose tale is yet untold
Resurrect! and before me stand.
Let memory chalice the ghost
Spilled to rumors beyond recall;
He lives yet, he did not fall,
Yet his bodying has not host.
What is this absent creature then
Who lives to others, shares their views
Of russet sunsets, yet eschews
The gravid face of his old friend?
Damned by discord, torn in twain,
Yet present to the fervid pitch
Of inner sense, a lively nothing which
Makes all mem'ry the mem'ry of pain.
Reveal! From shadow, gloom and gloam
Stand forth! and be again alive;
Here, where your memory still thrives,
Your dear self has yet a home.
When the windowpane fills with light
Sepulchral as a ghastly sail
Full of dead wind that will not fail
Despite the dark, despite the night,
And skin and breath half swell with sweat--
Though in itself that has not been
My own experience of sin--
Some knot inside the soul relents....
There in the insistent mist
A burning mast in a gull-grey shroud
Churns water and divides the cloud
And rides the tide as I did insist.
Be you friend or be you fear,
Palely limber in the halflight,
Almost fiction in false midnight,
Stand pale beside my bed, be near.
What you have to say, I would hear
Who, rash and rough in life before,
Sent from out this very door
Your solider emissary.
Wait, ghost, do not fade or fail!
What you speak I will not unsay
But hold in holy memory;
I would hear, would feel, your tale.
Voiceless the vision vanishes,
An untenanted guest again
Far gone along the moonlit plain,
Sourceless as our dearest wishes.
I stand untongued beneath the blank,--
At the balustrade, reach for dark,
See nothing there to hand me back
The loss of hope that's left me blank.
Piteous moon, shed tearlike light
On those who live below the clouds,
On us who circle in our shrouds,
Though no thing's worth its being bright.
Better still that grief... grief has come
And tears the hair and scrapes the eye,
Better we ourselves should wish to die
Than no feeling at all should come.
In my heart, a false fable starts
That 'tween two friends, so fair, so fast,
No rill of envy could ever pass,
No trickle winter could make crack.
Our summer was a million days
That on two shared pulses shone;
What was thought in the heart of one
The other's tongue found fit to praise.
Autumn's harvests had us chasing feasts
In distant dales neither knew;
The same sun and moon we saw
Overlooked our separate trysts.
December should have seen us come
Sharing triumphs round the table
Laughter-laden as a fable,
Strong in joy to a single home.
Too-far our wayfaring had swum,
Crests and valleys and the green roar
Held us apart forevermore,
Derelict, adrift, who had clung.
Iron frost the great granite breaks,
Too-cold sap splits the broadest tree
In solemn singularity;
Alone falls the proudest rock.
If some grave power left us here,
Solitary seekers in the night,
Lonely voyeurs of the light,
Shall we blaspheme what strength appears?
Far better, broader, more intense
To see the sign of good in things;
Amid haphazard waywardings,
Love what loveliness may commence.
If ever a bright butterfly
Has brought you unsuspected joy
Neath the canopy dark destroys,
Bless its shimmer and bless that sky.
If ever before brown defeat
Some glower gives some hint of glow,
Or all you are's not all you know,
Listen still to that heart, that beat.
If ever when wind's against us
Snarling sails that'd happily snapped
You feel amidst the clip and clap
One soft kiss blow, then don't resist.
If higher than twin towers' crowns
Your hopes have ever heralded
Only to be trapped back and barred
From achievement and from renown,
Listen still to what hope had heard,
Lift aloft for the light you saw
In premonition of your fall;
Seek heaven though it be in shards.
More lies in our looking there
With lovely eyes, tho' full of cares,
With hearts that have no ceased to share,
More of consequence than despair.
Though parted by pernicious fate
And left no solace when you left,
By your absence of solace bereft,
Yet still I loiter by the gate,
Looping hopes on echoes cool and slow
Of your departure seasons past;
When you went, you went at last
By going where you had to go.
Still I beside the gate am left,
Still I lean and lick the dust;
Still I wait, as still I must
Until some change unpains my breast.
The agile curfews of the night
That wipe away the palest day
And light's burning words lightly unsay
Cannot cross out what you left bright.
The moon that trod old empires down
Or saw two loves woo, two loves despair
Casts no changeful spell on my care
That carves the ages on my brow.
Electra longs for her lone ideal
Impatient with passion on her stoop,
Unarmed before the vicious troop,
Cries from poor girl's woe for her weal.
Antigone, tender to her core,
Going round and round in grief
Mills herself but sad relief:
To kill the state with grief too pure.
What value vaunts from remorse, or worse?
Justice, with adamantine edge
Turns crystal from a shaken tear
Solidified from sighs, or worse.
In a breast gone god-abandoned
What good does grief reveal?
What idol does a tear revere?
I have not earned what rosaries condone.
Never another lie to "get along,"
To manipulate the powerless,
To add confusion to their duress;
Never deception from the strong,
Never after venial convenience to strive
But all must be benign transparency
And facts alone the obduracy.
I resolve to struggle and to live
With difficult fact and effortful truth.
The Departed Friend
Even now the wrestling winter wind
Struggles in the window's flaw
And the charity of the sun is given over
To night's empty menace. My fingers
In sympathy with the very ice
Whiten and grow longer atop my coverings,
Hoisting the sheet simply as a wave.
Wind at the casement inks with creaks
What I had kept in lightest sketch,
Rounding to flesh with roars and moans
What I had kept in a whispering skull,
Dawn to dusk inside my soul,
Kept locked below some workaday hum
Whose once-amusing tune now tums in dread.
How can the body breathe when no hope gusts through,
Panicking the shutters to the outward sky?
So my body and my bed lay together stacked,
Mortised mates: the cadaver and mortician's table.
So I lay at the nadir-bottom of my thoughts
That had been high bearers-up before,—
Frothy self-involving silvered clouds
Radiant as watered stones in moonshine;
Now down in the sultry sinkhole bottom
Of a stirless pool no unburdening breeze will bless,
Over-crowed by moss-black cypress trees
Dripping no redemption from their dank,
So I lay, as now I lie in mental projection:
In the reeking warp and bursting of my coffin-box.
Here, in the mire, my meaning is near
My hidden wish insists I miss him,
Cause and consoler of my misery!
A foulish pool of moonlight at my feet
Shifts and shapes into his living shadow,
A sad long form too full of thought;
I stare into the abyss that I have brought.
I cannot speak, weak ghost, frail light
Overmastering me! All my mind’s
But memory of our untold hopes!
Shape of my friend who shaped me so!
Dear ghost, do not go, but let me rehearse
Our storied history to your toneless face;
Face whiter than the day gone blind.
Many hours had we trod the wood, near twins,
In each other's sidewise countenance
Discerning ourselves! After a little onward way
At a fenny brook stopped up we stopped
Restoring its foot-light laughter to the wood
That under many an autumn's confusion of leaves
Had clotted to brown silence. Heave
Of hands as wet as their work, as cold unfrozen
As vapored breath! At the stoppage's heart
In the very bolus of the blockage's glut
A dead raven wormed, fat with drowned maggots
Eating the mealy flesh that could no longer
Hold the wetted velvet of its feathers together.
Its dead eye was as sunken as the pit
Where we buried it. An office of farewell
Performed perforce in mutual accord
As like our old friendship together then
As unlike our alien parting now,
Never vetted in the abstraction of a vow.
Vengeance and ire are exiles to this mood
That even in the hurricano's house
Leave their livid imprints. Oh ghost
Called up from the waterspout
Of tears unwept and inly kept
Deliver now no elegy of division
That sunders life from life
And vanquishes the vivid phonemes of our dreams!
O newly denuded world
Bereft of friendship and benefit
Shorn of scorn and sorrow both
That have no object on which to act!
No syllable will tell
The night hauntings your each look has cast
Deep into the telling silence of my soul.
My soul! And what is that? A hollow word
More echoed out by poets than looked into.
But when at nighttime and for all the night
I search the remorseful strains of memory
To find some babble that will heal
Beside the note "Forget"— that and that alone
I say is soul— the willful welding
Of has been and is. If I could recall it all
Neither in melancholy nor high-hearted joy
And leave not one instant back to rot
I'd count myself a thing beyond a day.
How often has the robin's song come to this sill
And I noted it not? From that oblivion alone
I begin. Her redbreast puffed with expectation
And with mirth, and song trilled out as water
Spilled serially over the serried rocks.
Flow back up the stone along thou's song!
Let memory's viol play you as a tune
Worn true with loving,
Made soft-edged by your worth, our youth.
Communal comminglings of sun and moon
If each were source and both reflectors.
To've shared what we have given!
Day gathers day in its trooping hoop
And rolls on, agile and endless.
Although the spontaneous waterfall
May loiter at its foaming foot
Distilling a stillness in the tumult's depth—
Even so the swelling pool will whelm the lip
In moon as in noon, seeping the pristine banks
In affectionate and curious insistence.
So what we are flows to what
We must come to be, until our ruddy drops
Beset the universal ocean, whelmed
To give, and give all, and end all giving.
What cares the bee for the blossom's nuzzle?
What cares she or knows she how her work
In honey laid shall see a spring
That she herself shall never know?
Still the flower receives and the bee busily does
Whatever whiteness the one or buzz the other,
Mutually do they do, and mutually know not.
And yet, were they to know, to think, to care
What pause would press between the passions
Of their touch? What bee might meditate
Alone and unpollinated on some barer branch?
What flower shut to dawn its streaked pinks
So warmly showed to the showering rays before?
The mind remembers each tweet each note
And each soberer lowing of tuba or bassoon
No matter how distant the conductor's commencing click
May seem to present ears and hearers.
All's memorial from the moment of its making
To its last, dashing regretful recall.
No matter how blithely frivolous we live
Or howsoe'er delicate or fleet or half-materialized,
How subtle-soft, how hard to catch or kiss,
How almost nothing as a faded impulse unexplored—
Each unknowing moment of our fluttering is
In amber laid.
Now in my maturer melancholy
I long for the native joyance of my youth:
A sodden blossom beaten by the rain,
I sprang to the sun at its first clearing,
The skyey vault light-washed as a robin's egg,
I, who now am a rude sturdy twig froze round
As a hoop. Too many winters
Has my heaven-intending form laid low,
Frozen with distorted weight to whatever
Brambles crawled along the ministering dirt.
Physician! How can I find the cure
I knew so well when I did not know
I knew it! Now within me still I sleep,
A hibernate creature gone to moody caves,—
And cave and creature both wander lost within me!
I wander lost as Oedipus over earth, heartsore
When his crimes had cracked him to his core.
Wavy lengths of my hair sweat matted
To my forehead, heavy with road-dust;
Hair this wild year had left unshorn,
Numberless as the fruitless thoughts
That have pursued me— my own phantom—
As when the mirror presses darkness on my eyes.
Stars of eve, once the ready angels
Of my bedtime prayers, twinkling on my hopes
In looking wonder from the firmament,
Now cast chilly chastisements on my course
And make each way onward a mirror fouled
By the ignorant chance that moved me hence.
Onward naught and rearward naught
And oblivion within! In such state am I caught.
I am christened "Lost." My want of self
Haunted memory returned re-cleared to me,
As when in a clearest pool silver-laden
I saw what the world saw was me.
And when some minor upset rolls the pool
And puts the silver salver into sine
That self may still be seen in highlights and lows
Distorted but unbroken as it goes
Even unto the edges in an ermine flash.
Be it a leaf that loures upon the plane
Done with autumnal ripening
Or narcissistic lock let down
From avid, too avid, self-scrutiny
The result is still
This unstillness and its bends.
I stare at the soft frost edges of the room,
A moody amanuensis to the moon
Until elegant as a weeping pine
My soul steps from its sleeping source
And all the air is fraught with mist.
This image past of spirited play
Wavers in a mirror rude:
Slipshod appraisal of apprentice days
When love for love's sake came half-amazed
And gazed the neighboring fence half-along
Staring daisies into blotched sun-spots
And not the bright warm things they were
Themselves alone.
A demarcation has occurred— one unloves another.
A "cruel neglect and contemptuous silence ever since."
How can I respond to this new, denuded world?
Oh! Full many times I myself have seen
The glory's crown that old Coleridge taught—
Self-enhancing shadow of a thought—
When round my fallen shadow's head
A rainbow glory glowed in the snow
As I trudged with my sled up the steep
To the tipped top of the wintry hill
Ready to plunge again like thunder down
Into the gulf from which I'd come.
Convoys to their various destinies post
Finding their ways as they make them
Amid that startlement of the waves—
And to find themselves have lost the fleet
That sent them seaward into mists,
Sharpest demarcation of their long self-pursuit.
Now with more constant heart and firm resolve
My face may bear what winds upbraid me—
Or is this but a lie I level at my will....
The ghost is vanished! The departed friend
Filtered out the window without a syllable;
I lift myself and follow to the frame.
Is there some silver-tinged disturbance
Adding its fretted lattice to the leaves
Of the windy maples all about?
I cannot speak so well as shout
And fear my voice will only tell
Dead and final as a parting bell.
To the porch then—under stippled skies
I feel the clear vigor of the cold
Where a thousand stars like errless watchers
Pin me to my outpost. There, there
Hope deludes me with a moment's wish;
It was perhaps some serried sound
Of household dog turning round
To return to his hunter's sleep in peace.
But still some welling white is there
Besides the moon's. I see it blur
The boldened boundary of the field
Crowded with unfound flowers gone to weed.
Some shape is there—oh surely there—
Not all I know of one is departed yet
Still some mere shred lingers to be loved
And take of me forgiveness in the night.
Block all jealousies—all wrongs—all time
Beside the moment we wear now,
A gown new and mutable to our mutual need.
—One moment's presence is all I ask!
"Come! Turn your back to me no more, come back!"
I cry and the cry is like a thundercrack
Inside my grieving skull. No more turn away!
This night shall be as first light and life
Come from the most high into humanity—
Only let it touch what most remains
Of what we are this instant. The silver swells
At the field's end, growing larger as my
Charging heart! Ah yes! Companion prime
Of hope and heart—high hero of my contemplation
Turn to return! But wait! Tis gone, tis fled
All that was of brimming light has burst
And the iron balustrade cuts into my striking thighs
And the alien field lays darkened and undewed.
This single tear has dribbled down my face.
One friend one loss one parting!
Not if all the world were mirror for our woes
Could ten thousand lines tell the tale:
How heart is rent and soul must wail,
How in conversation with a blank
There is no love to conquer all our labors;
Amelioration is stemmed, and dead’s the tide
That had flooded all our flotsam and our hopes.
No expectation had been too heavy to be borne
Along the continual susurrations of such a main.
Dawn herself, and her twin, dusk,
Came and went well-colored by the clarity and depth;
The clouds that cooled and shadowed us
Were themselves sustained
By the liquid intercessions of watery faith.
The question of a quisling, of love
Lavished on a lesser thing, the friend departed
Who had been Palestine, home returned
And companion of adventure in a world of deeds,
This artificial death and detriment
Of two who had been connected
At their very source!
The isolated echo made moody and alone
—Gone the solidarity of arms embraced
Twins insistent as the signal sun
To burn our beings brightly and as one.
Now by sympathetic charm of grief
All friendship comes to this belief:
That those who now do love me well
Shall leave me soon in abandoned hell;
Like a rosary I keep these words
Beside me, counted close, and counted
Over again in each hour that I mourn.
Vain words that rehearse this rose
That goes away the way the sunset goes.
