Time means succession, and succession, change:
Hence timelessness is bound to disarrange
Schedules of sentiment. We give advice
570To widower. He has been married twice:
He meets his wives; both loved, both loving, both
Jealous of one another. Time means growth.
And growth means nothing in Elysian life.
Fondling a changeless child, the flax-haired wife
Grieves on the brink of a remembered pond
Full of a dreamy sky. And, also blond,
But with a touch of tawny in the shade,
Feet up, knees clasped, on a stone balustrade
The other sits and raises a moist gaze
580Toward the blue impenetrable haze.
How to begin? Which first to kiss? What toy
To give the babe? Does that small solemn boy
Know of the head-on crash which on a wild
March night killed both the mother and the child?
And she, the second love, with instep bare
In ballerina black, why does she wear
The earrings from the other's jewel case?
And why does she avert her fierce young face?
For as we know from dreams it is so hard
590To speak to our dear dead! They disregard
Our apprehension, queaziness and shame -
The awful sense that they're not quite the same.
And our school chum killed in a distant war
Is not surprised to see us at his door.
And in a blend of jauntiness and gloom
Points at the puddles in his basement room.
But who can teach the thoughts we should roll-call
When morning finds us marching to the wall
Under the stage direction of some goon
600Political, some uniformed baboon?
We'll think of matters only known to us -
Empires of rhyme, Indies of calculus;
Listen to distant cocks crow, and discern
Upon the rough gray wall a rare wall fern;
And while our royal hands are being tied,
Taunt our inferiors, cheerfully deride
The dedicated imbeciles, and spit
Into their eyes just for the fun of it.
Nor can one help the exile, the old man
610Dying in a motel, with the loud fan
Revolving in the torrid prairie night
And, from the outside, bits of colored light
Reaching his bed like dark hands from the past
He suffocates and conjures in two tongues
The nebulae dilating in his lungs.