The Music

WHEN Time was young
Time’s wing was downed with snow,
And snow hung
Like a soft lock adrift down the white brow,
The cold, untroubled brow —
So let us sing our lives away.

When Time was young,
Oh, then I did not dance,
Wanting some breath of music from his tongue;
Sunk in his glance,
His measured, his unsearching glance:
Still let us sing our lives away.

When Time was young
Time’s step was light, and slow.
My step halts now.
But now his flight howls a tune down the eaves:
Like sparrows in the leaves
Let us dance, and sing, our lives away.

HELL’S somewhere: a gray honeycomb, that each
May know by his own cell, exact, and furnished
(Sparsely) with the cinders of all he loves.
It is light there, or dark. From some center
A pulse curiously like that of a heart comes
Unhurried, unhurried — it will be counted,
And that continues history, that is experience,
The counting; forever, with the sound of never.

But heaven, what is heaven? And where,
End of what black trail frayed away by wind,
Beyond what crest of space, dazzling at last
The eyes, the heart —

Nothing. Nowhere.
Or if somewhere, then all’s an instant there,
Forever’s instant. And who could tell,
Who from so far could hear or listen for
That tick, when time that has him by the hand
Will lead him strongly down a passageway
He knows, into a space he knows, furnished
Sparsely — and say,
This is yours. I have brought everything
You wanted. If you call, I shall be here.

THIS day of sun and sound — this Sunday: will
The syllables of bells, the color, blue,
Be clear as this, recalled when, still less still
Than now, the dusk falls, and all failures blow?
Oh this dulls as I look; I look to lose
More, as more days darken and build me man:
And build of flesh the ages of the rose;
And build of bone the stages of the moon.

— Thinking that all the world’s less, less and less
Lessens what I would be. What I would be
Is strong — but strong is young, I would be, yes,
I craze with time, that glass I shiver by!
This day, this blaze of sound — bell-bright: so tall:
Look up! — but in that glass my eyelids fall.

ALL night the crickets plucked the familiar string, the strangeness
of moonlight sealed the stretched fields under spell,
and even strangers (pausing, puzzled, above some flower
that should have fallen when they were young)
muttered, I cannot with this older tongue
tell you, nor at this hour,
but such a face the world wore, I remember.
Changed;
or I do not remember well. —

All night the treetoads sang. The summer wood
rose from its pond of shadow. The urging wind, the dragging moon,
rubbed leaves to shivering fire; and fire forsook
the shaken leaves. Ash-gold, ash-gray, soot-
black, the world moved between warm and cool.

And even friends, ending their bridge or conversation
indoors, waited in doorways, watching the night unfold
in rigid golden light, and sighed, bewildered,
When we were children —
oh, but the world was always a wilderness,
surely, though seeming simple?
How surely we grow old,

how swiftly.
But such the world was.
Changed. —

All night the world said, It is all the same.
And friends, or strangers, said, We have climbed some stair,
have closed some door, (in triumph) have known some die!
and the world said, You are what you were,
I will show you what you were. And all said,
friends, and strangers, No — no, all is changed
but if the same we cannot now remember,
would not remember well, would not recall
what the world was, or what we were, at all.

All night, the wind plucked the familiar string;
and the water sang, the water sang.