I
The Maze
At mid-morning her wheel-chair seems to rock
Softly, plaited and varnished, free
Of the light held thick with clearness
Under the sill. The lawn of ivy rustles.
As he sits and reads, hand on wicker table,
Light passing over his wrist and sleeve
And fingers composedly trembling
As if raised, not sure, nor yet in appeal
From an animal partially withdrawn,
Ivy moving together in one heaped, gently
Flaking sound, an angel comes to pay
Him for his wife. He knows with what
Inflections the spirit relievedly smiles
Through the braced shuttle of the blind
Hung with its side-faced and deepening coin.
He feels his palm glance into the small
Cambricked light, and the other burns off,
Not seen, past the window: the stripes turn
For one closed furious shock of sun, black,
Or solid light, and behind them something runs,
Pattering rapidly over the ivy leaves,
Then stands.
He takes his cap and cane
And goes out the bright door, down
The three stairs into the garden,
For a moment looking up at the house
Like a cliff, forty years old, white,
The back as pretty as the front.
In the summerhouse mired in roses
He pins a rose-leaf with his cane,
And hears the intricate circle glide
Form within form toward perfect
Silence, order, place, and sun.
Here, he imagines the statue of a boy,
Or a girl, it is sexless with youth,
On a pedestal: just the warm head
And unfinished shoulders. Leaves,
The small-squared light, shower it
With motion, and lay the shadows
Bare against the hesitant sweet mouth.
He wraps his fingers on the cane, shifts,
And tries to think. Beside, before
His trying, inside the hedges, the green
Lattice-work, on gravel, the head stands,
A cloud breathed dazzling about its unknown
Rain, conceived like thirst, not moving,
Never giving up, fiercer, more perfect
Unchanged. Toward the slender lips, his voice
Brims like a harp, and is still.
Day after day the edges of the mouth
Hold more, to keep the smile the same,
As though the sculptor, having placed a hand
In the clean spring of his childhood,
With the other flowered stone to dream
His mother’s face. It is healed forever
Into shadows: it need not speak,
It need not lift into noon, nor to his face:
He has nothing but to believe
In the silver light coming through it,
And out of the harmless wild of the eyes
Altering, and altering back
So fast there is no change, and he must run
Still and deep to his gaze as stone
To make the bright rooms stop
Upon him here, their flowers close
Him down among the cut paths of the sun.
At night each leaf of ivy trembles
As though it grew sharply, lightly,
Over a mouth. All night, upstairs,
He thinks of wandering, lifting his hand
Upon his chest, feeling it solidly
Hold him there, as he turns in the leaves
And corners of the paths of the centerless
Garden. Subtly the hedges are changed
Out of a mind exhaustless, clear, struck whole
Into its open gaze prefigured deviously
In crossing wheels and limits of the sight
Through fire, in forests grown amazed and mild
About recurrent passage. The ivy scatters,
Bending to moon-white, as a low wind breasts.
Scott? Falcon? Falcon Scott? Such cold
To hover trackless, for miles, he did not wish
He came again ироп
his dead soul,
Leaning forward out of the air
Of the circle, touches him, and the circle parts
To his lifted hand at the same place,
But the place itself is changed
Over with suns through different, more
Radiant brush, perfect, beginning again,
Marvelling painlessly
for a moment
He is confused by a stone figure
Of his mother’s: a boy with a straw
Marble hat. He grins into the dark
Like an old young man, and the timbers
Of a fiery wood fall dead together
About him, into his cool-breathing house,
And he sleeps, and the angel wakes.
II
The Angel
Steadily in the thinning dark
His sleep forms on the pane,
Delicate, blurred into one
Renewing continuous white
Stride of breath toward morning.
The broad walls of his room
Swim in tentative flowers.
As he wakes, as his gray mind cramps
Drowning on the unshaped weight
Of air, I am deeper into marble
Fractured, again and again
Broken back to hold his waning head
In conclusive mystery he feels
As awe, as something properly done
He cannot grasp, appointing entire
The low siege of ivy, brush,
Roses like two hands caught
Together and seen through an artery,
Beginning to hold out of air
Features mask-like and bearable,
Humbly smiling, prettily forlorn.
Down the white seethe of marble
The sun is limed upon my breast;
The particles boil coldly
Circling into place, and
The ancient summer closes
In a storm of corruptible leaves
Upon the ruins of heaven.
The sun kills his breath through glass.
From the blue print of sunlight
On his page, he bends to walk
After the dazzling solitude of wings
He cannot think, or that he would,
If he could, believe as trailing
Awkwardly underfoot, like oars,
And sits where their snow-graved feathers
Warmly danced over by depth
Fold tremorless into the child.
His gaze falls earnestly,
Changing through my head
Into the earth, whereon I lie,
A virgin, still in the slender hall
Of roses, wedded to die
Again, be broken eagerly
Across the altar scented
Of rockery stone and fern,
And the dumb, first breath
Of the entering angel plays,
Deepening, unsteady,
With stumbling force blares
Heavily, silently, until the child
Rises to the gold and humming
Of the leaves. Here, where purity
Sharpened upon my age, and, scraped
By cloth to bleed, one eye
Pulled empty by the lights
Of every room, the other burning
Near a snow, a stone, a child
Weeping into its teeth, I struck
Into the bent and whirling spokes
To labor down your halls
Onto the porch, and see the garden
Made, Ervin, you sit steadily
Holding the great crushed bow
Of your blood, among the grasses,
In the soft deadfall of sun
Where the white image grinds with fury
Of life to make your mortal limits
One, draw in, be near. Breathe,
Nod, Ervin. Your peace is inescapable:
Each moment brings to leaf
A deepening order of change
Perpetually renewed
In decisive, unattainable
Ceremony, which is the dead.
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