I. PASSING-BELL
In the pale corridor of afternoon
The smell of loss clings greenly to the wall.
Ministering human lacks, quicksilver nuns,
The nurses chart his forces as they fall.
Sinking with evening, all that host of life,
Of pain, of weakness borne from womb to world
Huddles in sterile white. A shape of grief
That had run wild goes back to dark uncurled.
And for this water off the weeping eaves
Drips to a dagger pendant from the stone
Or incremental like the sweat of caves
Builds fantasies of ice. It works alone
Like grief, like pain. Death had a lust for flesh
Against all love a man and wife could fire
And locked him in the zero of its wish
As night fell and the stars strode cold and higher.
II. THE FATHER
This Heorot, still cold, this hall of stone
That lives inside, is this my dwelling-place?
Here must the spring heart shrivel up its scope?
O the monster seized on winter in the bone
And blood to take my firstborn, and no trace
For the baffled heart to follow, crying hope.
I who had built and banked my loves around
Now in this winter know the fiend and wake
To death in the eye of morning and the dumb
Desolate plain of day. Did I but wound
The monster in my hall? its courses shake
And I have slept and wake at morning numb.
Let her come now, the mother of all ill,
Yet shall I track her through the winter dark,
Plunge with her to the bottom of her pool
And fight a year and a day until she spill
Her life or mine. There-as the watchdogs bark
I see her wicked hands grope at the sill.
III. THE MOTHER
Listening at night to the timbers of my house
Constricting tick to the frozen hours awake,
I feel sleep gathering from me like a snake
Gone stiff from winter with spring far to rouse
Only the silent reaches of the hall,
The brutal traffic muttering down the street:
And lying so this white night I entreat
The vision of his stilled room to grow small,
Dwindle and heat the inner eye with red
A moment for that snake of sleep to stir,
Engross me in the coil, make food of her
That fed a child once out of brain and blood.
Let me have done with miring in that bog
Where all the impossible undone I do
And sweat the night and him to life while through
The rifted blind the moon sifts like a fog.
IV. DEATH
Who spoke? My name fell in someone’s desire,
I heard it, being a lover with a name.
All my cast loves have dwindled out in fire
Or in my crucible ground repeat my same
Experiment in mire.
Who calls me to his side? I am a god
Of exquisite lusts to havoc on the sense
And go where life finds tongue to tell the odd
From even, perfect from imperfect tense,
The seedling from the sod.
Is it a lover calls me so? I listen
And watch my dials and gauges reckoning course
To all I love, yet none has ever hastened
In love to me but has his hate to curse
And lust to christen.
There lives no deadlier love than for a child,
And I am there like memory or gain
Growing within the sac, by growth beguiled
Until my love cries ‘Speak or Death is slain
And the tame turned wild.’
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