Quae Lucis Miseris Tam Dira Cupido? Dicam

But high above the word “Love” cried
By angels in precipitous places;
I am the part of me that died
Putting the racehorse through his paces,
Driving the car across the tracks,
Lying out blue in the best room bed.
I am that unhappy part that lacks
All the gentility of the dead
And cannot see, and cannot see
Where the love is to comfort me.

And demons in the depth cry “Love”
Mournfully, with distorted faces,
Sea elephants and beasts that move
With clumsy dignity seek their places
Choired in their impulse to adore
The fact of rot and dissolution
I am the thing I was before
Fixed in my fleshly constitution
And cannot hear, and cannot hear
The word that echoes at my ear.

The gods and goddesses, rank on rank
Range in their several states and graces;
I am the flesh that dying stank,
Stinking, was thrown to charnel places.
This meat the mumbling lip of worm
Draws back from, having wholly fed;

The frail bones leave their cage of form
Finding the new shape of the dead.
Only the small unmoving mind
Cries for me, being left behind.

And stars look out like ordered eyes
Into their claim, their different spaces
Exulting as each body dies,
Glad for the wind from emptied places
Where what was good has yet gone by,
Though beautiful, yet did not stay,
But fell, as through a rim of sky
Into the blind, continuous day,
And cannot know, and cannot know
What it was like to have been so.

Love hammers totally at the ear
From snails’ horns, from seraphic faces,
From every beast of sea and air,
From pinions, fins, from carapaces,
All caught in that unthinking sound,
All moving with that simple motion
In positive certainty around
Axes of positive devotion
And I must be, and I must be
Now of this only company.

Forget the voice with which I sing
But sing, forget the dancing paces
But dance, forget there was a spring
Before this summer’s great embraces.
You innocence of hand and eye,
Pleasures of satin or of sight,
Now go, letting me put you by
For the bare clarity of this light
Where I may praise, where I may praise
Love in the clean, unending days.