End of the Period
I.
Door swing
gun roar
sound of swaying feet
through the floor.
The pigeons
that once wandered in the square
are nowhere,
have fled back to their wilderness retreat.
Only a child is in the square.
I can see her though the house shakes.
I heard once
swinging down-lane on the way to school
birds open in the square;
the sun shone down the blades
through the dark of my back
and the world seemed about to create,
you know?
As if beginning again,
then, towards evening,
climbing the stair,
into my quiet room,
a loneliness was there.
I would take my train,
and run it down the tracks,
into nowhere, into the wildwood,
but safe from uncontained attacks.
I would leap ravines
and storm a bridge, with infinite ramparts behind,
only that moment alive,
and no thought in my mind.
But I would go to bed an evening when it rained
patterns like the raising of the dead
and all the things remembered that I said.
And when the sun shone into my room,
deepening terror growing through the gloom;
O God was love and toil,
the point which smiled,
and pity grew and cried,
and my child, this one,
found the sun was doom
past which no one sailed
nor one which could carry
beyond the bounds of him.
II.
The town has fallen, must have fallen down,
since in the room is no sound.
Only a little.
can you move?
It is dark though the streets shine
in broken moonlight;
climbs above the chimney pots,
above the dead.
Mist and sun.
Marble arch and carved door
into which we blend
with evening mist
descending from the sun
… You stood so long and pure.
my heart shone like the moon
transcendent in a pool
where light is an echo of your farthest thought.
From where did you come
to stand like the moon descended by my door?
Why are you here
angel with the white eyes?
The world is dead outside
the trees are still,
cannot move.
Throbs and throb my wrist,
heart pushing its life into
the drain outside.
My head is tired,
would sleep.
Afterwards she came again.
How hard the stones upon our feet!
Later, in a drunken mood, I thought of that.
She never came again.
Her eyes like the sunbeams
in which two worlds meet:
they cry with joy,
they play, as it were, by the seaside
without thought
or mind
Mindless the echoes that roll
Like waves rolling on the beach
Bursting in white fragments out of reach.
III.
In the square was a torn child.
And in myself the thought of day awoke again;
but it was only a glimmer in the eye,
a dead secret in the wind,
in the mountain’s arms,
and in the room
sunlight on the floor.