For David Cochrane, killed on Parnassus, 1929.
She, on the path where he had gone,
Even now assembles rock. To touch
The pulse of water that runs on
Is to have lost and found so much.
Was it not there that he caught hold,
Where Delphi hears the hidden spring?
And there Prometheus’ fire like gold
Under the edge of that great wing
Suddenly caught his nineteen years
As thundering, whirling waters go,
Into whose stream the mind’s eye stares
Where the light gathers all we know.
Light on Parnassus: there, keen-brained,
He struck it from the flint he held,
And halfway up the rock attained
A sky no other man beheld,
Wrought of old cities like a skein
Gathered from gate and buried wall,
Whirling about that single vein.
What mountain eagle watched him fall?
His crooked climbing, out of joint,
Possessed the Sibyl in her cell;
And still she looks to Cochrane’s Point
Silent, as though her brother fell.
There in Arakhova men say
He climbed by moonlight; others guess
That the sun dazzled him. He lay
Long near a precipice. Pages press
Life, like a flower. A myth is laid
Mute, where these guardian trees surround
The chiselled stone a workman made.
Under that rock his bones were found;
And seventeen years are gone, where now
Light, like a new-found blossom, breaks.
I ponder this, much marvelling how
His daemon haunts the path she takes
Who never saw him. Yet he struck
Fire from the rock with all he said.
His daemon so transforms chat rock
That the rough world, not he, is dead.
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