And hearkened to the summer hour;
The sky was slightly out of true,
And baking in the steady heat
Like fields of over-muscled wheat
The garden lawn turned blue;
Reminded with a humid power
Of sadness in the insects’ drone,
The distant doves’ decaying coo,
My mind patrolled the walled-in grounds
Like some poor sentry on his rounds,
And ceased to think of you.
Who
can imagine what it meant
To
hold an empire in your hand,To struggle with the northern hordes
While Stoic fingers on the sky
Wrote, “There is no final why,”
To the clashing of the swords;
To languish on the beaten sand
Where only the condemned were sent,
And hear your fate upon the boards
As hangmen came to disabuse
A mind intent upon its muse
And roughly cut the cords?
Honour
to him who late at night
Dismissed
his household to their beds,And turned the pale moon of his face
To sift those fragments of the sage
Which gave coherence to the page
And taught what was the case;
Who wept for all the broken heads
Defeated in their final fight
To halt the passing of the race,
And sought to find within the wreck
Salvation of the intellect
And quested after grace.
The
way of mind, the way of flesh
Are
opposite and reconciled.The teacher sitting in his cave
Has found the dew beneath the stones,
The emptiness beneath the thrones,
The power of the wave;
The artist by his skill beguiled
Paints what is true that’s in the dress
Which all the flowers of summer have,
And both have knowledge of the right
But cannot comprehend the light
Within a stone-built nave.
My
love, the blooms upon this rose
Are
lips to welcome your return;This sunken garden is the bed
Where nakedness discovers in
The blush upon each other’s skin
A blessing of the dead.
Let all the mealy-mouthed who spurn
Such moments from their cheap repose
Go cluster where the Laws are read;
The frankness of your honest eyes,
The honest frankness of your cries,
Say more than kissing said.
Our
love may be a lonely sigh
Against
the twilight in the wood,And all the story of the past
May only live in that domain
Because we tell the tale again
In words which will not last;
But Eros with his pricking blood
Is yoked to Agape, and I,
Who know not how the cards are cast,
Must in the circle of my arms
Enfold you from the fierce alarms,
The night which comes on fast.
====================
© August 1980