He eyes November when the hills of umber
In utter autumn seep, sodden and somber.
Rain sinks his eyes; he sees a watery sleep
Globing the gray world’s ‘s dying;
The window swims in runneled light, denying
Sight to the house whose eye can weep.
And yet his mind
Makes the blind universe where he is blind.
He turns, inward toward love, the only
Goal of pure being. He is lonely
As love’s explorers in the farthest places
Are always lonely. Love, he thinks, will perish,
As all things living whose hunger is their basis;
Love’s mouth can never nourish
The pit of being. Rather,
Self, seeking another,
Hacks out the living flesh and gives
In hope of being eaten,
Until what’s left, what lives,
Is nothing, nothing but origin,
The nut that none can sweeten.
Then desperately the ultimate, hopeless lover
Practices in his need
The ritual of the seed,
And learns thereby the last chagrin:
The shame of want, the smart,
The imprisoned heart.
Over
The blind house rain
Washes in thickening plumes. He turns
Again. What cost of pathos and ancient pain
Lies sea-like in his eyes! Today he learns
Newly the timeless crisis at being’s center.
The rain, blood of the fading world, the rain of winter,
Flows like a sea-long dream from wounds without number,
Seeping, closing his mind in a soul’s sleep, a cold slumber.
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