His Father's Ghost

To these sharp perilous heights, his heart alone
Must climb despite the body’s weak distress:
If from such peaks the heart be overthrown,
His body’s safety offers no redress.
Here cleft are chasms of the fearful night,
Where mind and heart contrive to be at one
In the long seconds of awakened fright
That shall persist till the dispelling sun.
Here are the canyons shadow-full and sheer
Whose misty walls contain the shapes of dread,
Here flows the river of remembered fear,
Here flows the fear of the remembered dead.
Not love itself may make his heart refrain
From these high, lonely ridges of its pain.

Awake? awake? This blue and coiling spring
Awakes a lesser heart to beat in small
And steely rhythm while he sees the swing
Of lightless shadows on the night-clad wall;
The frosty floor’s unnecessary tongue
Demands ‘Below, below? what lies below?’
The corded muscles of the heart are wrung
With hurtful echoes to the words: ‘I know.’
But does he know? In what confusion lies
That shape heaped flowers cannot recompense?
What is behind too closed, too lidded eyes ?
What does love’s emanation threaten hence?
There’s but the empty shell that once denied
The reach of heaven, and yet in loving died.

Here in the thick and darkest black of all,
His mind constructs the shape of every bent
And squeaking tread whose speech is the blind call
Of lost feet groping in a slow descent.
Fingers could warn him of another frame —
A closed door standing, in his mind, agape;
Behind its panels, an unseen, single flame
Throws shadows on the flowers and the shape?
Oh, this is but the shape of him that died,
The empty casing love must disunite —
How is its emanation now belied
That seeps like terror through the fissured night!
Is this the ghost that cuts his heart, that tears,
That makes him coward of the midnight stairs?

So he remains who cannot bear to see:
The chilly stairs tell tales of the long-dead
Whose feet in darkness, and once warily,
Moved to a love with every upward tread.
His bed is cold but he will warm it soon,
His mind was torn to the cold bed below:
It will be empty in the afternoon —
Will emptiness forever haunt him so?
Where now the spirit that gave full consent
To each companioned and accustomed way?
Must it be terror when the light is spent,
Will it be love in the awakened day?
O ghost! lie still, lie still as love is bound,
He may not spade your memory in the ground.

The dawn is now upon the peaks again,
The ridges take their color from the sun,
These are the haunts alone of lonely men
Who follow where wild feet of night have run.
The chasms turn to warm and browner tones,
The river flows discernible and far,
The everlasting cleavage of its stones
Drowns pallid music of the morning star.
In such profusion of oncoming gold
No silver ghost can walk in terror here,
But the familiar of good days grown old,
A phantom comrade hunts remembered deer.
The empty shape is buried in the dust,
And love is cleaned of night’s corroding rust.

In all the passion of the living hours
That will be told in sunlight and in stars,
There’ll be no terror now that faintly cowers
Under the wounding of such haunted scars,
But every coiling of the gold and green
That bears a river’s wilderness along,
The lavender of dawn-marshes half unseen,
The flighting plover’s high and metal song,
The phrase that’s rubbed round like a tidal stone,
The hush of small waves underneath a bow,
The whistle of brown wings that mount alone,
The doubled shots across the autumn plough,
The ridge of trout-flight over weaving moss —
All fuse at last into one cherished loss.