The living come with grassy tread
To read the gravestones on the hill;
The graveyard draws the living still,
But never any more the dead.
The verses in it say and say:
‘The ones who living come today
To read the stones and go away
Tomorrow dead will come to stay.’
So sure of death the marbles rhyme,
Yet can’t help marking all the time
How no one dead will seem to come.
What is it men are shrinking from?
It would be easy to be clever
And tell the stones: Men hate to die
And have stopped dying now forever.
I think they would believe the lie.
O bony relic of forgotten days,
Which, from my bookshelf, dominates the room,
Your empty sockets, with sardonic gaze,
Follow me weirdly in the deepening gloom!
I often think, if sudden speech returned,
You might reveal that secret, grisly jest
You're grinning at—or tell me what you've learned
Of that dark realm to which we're all addressed.
By what rude hands were you exhumed, and why
Wrenched from your body in its earthy bed?
Who knows but such indignity will I
Receive at other hands, when I am dead,
And, strangely resurrected, may adorn
The wall or desk of one as yet unborn!
Mountain, Wolf, Oak, Bird, Dream, and I
are here together today.
All waiting the decision
that time will announce
about which or who will flee first
from this siege.
We talk, kiss, sing and help each other,
while not forgetting
even for a moment, the deception.
Although the world
has more than enough space
for all of us,
we still feel cramped
and stealthily we pray
for each other’s death.
Then time starts reading its verdict.
Laugh lines and signs of failing liver
Wrinkles and knobby belly
They say one thing
‘The child has turned old
The child has turned into a crocked man
And he crumples up like a dry leaf
On the dance floor
Ask the janitor for a shovel
Scoop up that dry corpse from the dance floor
Do it quickly
Do it fast
Let the music last
And last
a scrap of satin - some wood
what is beneath the wood ?
dirt : the earth
it is cold
is it alive ?
it contains the stir of flowers
it contains the whispering grass
and above it all ?
some turf
the blue sky
what are you listening to ?
my dark blood
the heart plays a tattoo
beneath this pale linen
this wool-stuff
and ?
New wrinkles
in my hands
are well matched
to those in yours.
Now we have loved,
we cannot die.
His flesh, pale as the marble
Fashioned into the destiny of his days,
Is on display in the show window
Of a nearby antiques store on
The Alameda de Hércules.
As for his soul, if he had one,
No one is sure what merchant
Might now possess it.
Two centuries after Christ,
Someone did make sure that a block
Of purest stone render him immortal,
Like the flight of birds
Or the ebb and flow of the tides.
I invited him to dine with me,
To share lamb,
And his story and the stories
Inside a pyramid, its reason:
A former king parched like a leaf
And now impervious to grief,
Bacilli, and a shift of season.
Dust of a million builders’ bones
Informs the wind with grit, lingers,
Then scrapes with unbelieving fingers
Familiar blocks of hand-hewn stone.
Not long from now
nor far from here’s
the place where all
that matters now,
even if it matters then,
must matter to
somebody else.
To anyone who finds
this note: good luck
and look ahead
to your last place
not far, not long
from when and where
you read this—your
eyes, your mind
alive and quick
The quay is quiet
after the day’s riotous
weather. We wonder, stunned,
about such fundamental
concepts as property.
Suddenly how very strange
it is to think that anyone
would claim to own
a piece of Earth. Our
ponderings give way
to hunger, fatigue, and vertigo.
Horizon
is florid like the face
of our friend caressing whiskey.
Birds scream in palm trees.
Tackle on the boats knocks
I am contained
in the cup of me.
Originally,
it is claimed, we came
from the sea.
Actually,
what emerged were versions
of something that could
turn into us. Nonetheless,
here I am, a full
cup of me,
a compound composed
of me, salt
water modified,
elaborated, prorated,
not quite yet
I am among the careless dead
Who do not rise to see
Why I should hurry through their flowers
Beneath their willow tree,
Nor lift their hands from off their breasts
To beckon me.
But though I run so lightly through
The myrtle's rambling mass,
And though my feet step silently
Above the blowing grass.
And though they do not stir or speak —
They know I pass.