Lying alone, the body feels its sins
And does not press catastrophe away.
In the nervous newsreel of the shuttered eye
Again and once again the old clowns play
At history; Rome falls: but egos sigh
For suburbs where all tragedy begins.
And personally, the single mind is moved
By sudden scent of the garden larkspur;
The heart lifts at a remembered street,
Names over the lost and the beloved,
As dear to it as any lover Shakespeare
Lamentably wounded and could never meet.
For the cities display gross intimacy
And only famish by collective itch
The desire always to be engrossed
In love, to have at heart the lover’s touch;
Or to find in the world’s cartography
The self as country and the name embossed.
For this desire travelers may tell
Of voyages that took them far from home,
Of the foreign river and the colored cape;
How the mornings whistled and the stars fell
Around two worlds in snow; but none,
Though navigating hugely, could escape.
For following always the rumors come:
The larkspur whispers in the desert night
And the cape transports the dreaming head
Backward to corners erased at home
Where the boys played hide and seek, and flight
Was unreal; all the voyagers were dead.
But alone again the body contracts
Against its death, and shudders alone
Remembering the hair-breadth accident,
The chilled incentive to the guilty acts:
How none may kiss and only once was won
Wisdom and its antecedent.
Never again will the body rise
To morning, nor rein the dark night in
From pelting nightmare or congealed surprise,
Since horror is preoccupied with sin
And every goodness is delayed suspense
Till hands refresh the pivot point of sense.
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