Now each has climbed to the uninhabitable,
My song rings oddly. Soot floats down the street.
Behind plate glass rot sweets no one shall eat,
While overhead on its iron grill
Somebody’s shape a sheet
Unwinds from slowly tosses in our moonless heat.
Those others, who knows where they are?
The lonely man. He steals through doors ajar
Up to some breathing pen
Of brothers, pours a phial of his own pain
Into each sleeper’s ear, then slips unseen
Down towards day, the happy din.
Each sleeper knows. Rivers inside of him
Rise. His palms glide upon his own dark skin.
His eyes sleep-blind but gleaming wide
Fill with the same warm tide
That laps our piers come morning. In his dream
The highest water mark stands for wisdom.
I, I know only that when the dawn mist
Discourages one bare gold dome like rust,
When stones fume I shall rest,
Loving my neighbor as myself,
No more, no less, for I do not love myself,
But something stirs, stirs now. At love’s name? No,
No apparition, neither any abrupt gust
Of roses’ fragrance, here where none grow:
The hair rises almost,
The throat just tries to close, so quietly do
You find me, topple at my feet, poor ghost,
Sung to sleep by a first and faraway cockcrow.
You I forget, you whom the immemorial
Wraps round with many a foolish vow,
Hush! all at once our graying vistas billow
Like cloths, a canvas town.
My eyes fill with a seeing not their own.
Those cloths aside, your sleep is what I know.
Leave a Reply