Walking out in the late March midnight
With the old blind bitch on her bedtime
errand Of ease stumbling beside me, I saw
At the hill’s edge, by the blue flooding
Of the arc-lamps, and the moon’s suffused presence
The first leaves budding pale on the thorn trees,
Uncurling with that crass light coming through them,
Like the translucent wings of insects
Dilating in the dampness of birth;
And their green seemed already more ghostly
Than the hour drowned beneath bells, and the city
sleeping,
Or even than the month with its round moon sinking.
As a white lamb the month’s entrance had been:
The day warm, and at night unexpectedly
An hour of soft snow falling silently,
Soon ceasing, leaving transfigured all traceries,
These shrubs and trees, in white and white shadows;
silk screens,
Where were fences. And all restored again in an hour.
And as a lamb, I could see now, it would go,
Breathless, into its own ghostliness,
Taking with it more than its tepid moon.
And here there would be no lion at all that is
The beast of gold, and sought as an answer,
Whose pure sign in no solution is,
But between its two lambs the month would have run
As its varying moon, all silver,
That is the color of questoins.
Oh there as it went was such a silence
Before the water of April should be heard singing
Strangely as ever under the knowing ground
As fostered in me the motion of asking
In hope of an answer that fated leaves,
Sleep, or the sinking moon might proffer,
And in no words, but as it seemed in love only
For all breath, whose departing nature is
The spirit of question, whatever least I knew,
Whatever I most wondered. In which devotion
I stayed until the bells struck and the silver
Ebbed before April, and might have stood unseizing
Among answers less ghostly than the first leaves
On the thorn trees, since to seize had been
Neither to love nor to possess;
While the old bitch nosed and winded, conjuring
A congenial spot, and the constellations
Sank nearer already in the thought of summer.
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