I
It is a luxury, so circumstanced in summer,
Thinking of affection as abstraction,
Separate from you.
Clouds
Out of the huge cloud-gulf of the west
Come up, ferns of asparagus
Across them wave. One cloud
Passes, releases cool wind along my
Upper arm, then
Sting of the sharp sun.
A blue smoke rises from a yard below,
Thins to a less blue, and through
The mucked horizon of near trees a paling
Threads a close-set pattern down.
I scratch the bites across my wrist,
Hear leaves, observe blue smoke now
Against grey of a fat cloud re-
covering the sun; I think, I say,
Of this abstract of affection (you
Having gone to town) and, in
Some photo, of round Ionesco’s
Face of a clown unbrutishly repeating
All’s absurd.
II
My habits are not regular, I don’t
Set periods aside or work by a clock.
I should do nothing oftener, think
Of you more and of affection
Less, eyeing always that
Which is automatic.
I think, when she interrupted,
I should have given just now the slim
Gypsy child the two coins she
Held out her hand for. Some moments
Reveal too much and-just as well-
Are deliberately quickly forgotten:
I was too lazy, I accepted
The estimate of gypsies,
Which may be correct; stopping the luxury
Of thinking of affection,
I should have gone indoors and fetched her
The money she asked for-Why not?
I acted
Like that balding Fool in London who’s
Collected a Council of Fools to consider
Not their prurience but what they
Suppose obscene: the child followed
Her métier, I was stingy, I followed mine,
And it rains now and I am forced
Away from the sibilance of bullfinches sad
In deep leaves behind me:
I should remember longer than I shall
That I was mean (not only because that
Child-gypsy was naked-footed
And was slim).
III
In the sky scene as I move I notice
The greyness of the underside of the great
Cloud now above me; and a round
Hole through this grey, and in this hole
Blue, and the white
Top of a thunder-cloud unseen otherwise away In the
queue of the clouds.
By this is excused nothing,
Illuminated nothing, symbolized
Nothing unless accident, accident,
Can be described as something?
Such as myself or you? Such as the gypsy
Child, such as that noble ninny in London
(Whom I recall as a petulant
Blonde-haired undergraduate tossing
His wonder mop when he was found
Out in one more pious intellectual stupidity)?
It is raining heavily. I shall
Continue, indoors, reading
Of the severer absurdity
Of the Archpriest Avvakum, adjuring
His Old Believers to stride into flames
And fix themselves to the stake. “For this
We came out of our mother’s womb. You
Will not be long burning. A twinkling
Of an eye, and the Soul is free.”
The Soul.
It strikes midday through the rain,
From the church above, for the second time.
I hear the burr of the car
With you returning.
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