Unfinished upon his death (November 1953)

Edited by Vernon Watkins
	
			Elegy 

		Too proud to die; broken and blind he died
		The darkest way, and did not turn away,
		A cold kind man brave in his narrow pride

		On that darkest day, Oh, forever may
		He lie lightly, at last, on the last, crossed
		Hill, under the grass, in love, and there grow

		Young among the long flocks, and never lie lost
		Or still all the numberless days of his death, though
		Above all he longed for his mother's breast

		Which was rest and dust, and in the kind ground
		The darkest justice of death, blind and unblessed.
		Let him find no rest but be fathered and found,

		I prayed in the crouching room, by his blind bed,
		In the muted house, one minute before
		Noon, and night, and light. the rivers of the dead

		Veined his poor hand I held, and I saw
		Through his unseeing eyes to the roots of the sea.
		(An old tormented man three-quarters blind,

		I am not too proud to cry that He and he
		Will never never go out of my mind.
		All his bones crying, and poor in all but pain,

		Being innocent, he dreaded that he died
		Hating his God, but what he was was plain:
		An old kind man brave in his burning pride.

		The sticks of the house were his; his books he owned.
		Even as a baby he had never cried;
		Nor did he now, save to his secret wound.

		Out of his eyes I saw the last light glide.
		Here among the liught of the lording sky
		An old man is with me where I go

		Walking in the meadows of his son's eye
		On whom a world of ills came down like snow.
		He cried as he died, fearing at last the spheres'

		Last sound, the world going out without a breath:
		Too proud to cry, too frail to check the tears,
		And caught between two nights, blindness and death.

		O deepest wound of all that he should die
		On that darkest day. oh, he could hide
		The tears out of his eyes, too proud to cry.

		Until I die he will not leave my side.)

Clown In The Moon


My tears are like the quiet drift
Of petals from some magic rose;
And all my grief flows from the rift
Of unremembered skies and snows.

I think, that if I touched the earth,
It would crumble;
It is so sad and beautiful,
So tremulously like a dream.

Sometimes The Sky's Too Bright

Sometimes the sky's too bright,
Or has too many clouds or birds,
And far away's too sharp a sun
To nourish thinking of him.
Why is my hand too blunt
To cut in front of me
My horrid images for me,
Of over-fruitful smiles,
The weightless touching of the lip
I wish to know
I cannot lift, but can,
The creature with the angel's face
Who tells me hurt,
And sees my body go
Down into misery?
No stopping. Put the smile
Where tears have come to dry.
The angel's hurt is left;
His telling burns.

Sometimes a woman's heart has salt,
Or too much blood;
I tear her breast,
And see the blood is mine,
Flowing from her, but mine,
And then I think
Perhaps the sky's too bright;
And watch my hand,
But do not follow it,
And feel the pain it gives,
But do not ache.

Not From This Anger

Not from this anger, anticlimax after
Refusal struck her loin and the lame flower
Bent like a beast to lap the singular floods
In a land strapped by hunger
Shall she receive a bellyful of weeds
And bear those tendril hands I touch across
The agonized, two seas.
Behind my head a square of sky sags over
The circular smile tossed from lover to lover
And the golden ball spins out of the skies;
Not from this anger after
Refusal struck like a bell under water
Shall her smile breed that mouth, behind the mirror,
That burns along my eyes.

On No Work of Words 

On no work of words now for three lean months in the
bloody
Belly of the rich year and the big purse of my body
I bitterly take to task my poverty and craft:

To take to give is all, return what is hungrily given
Puffing the pounds of manna up through the dew to heaven,
The lovely gift of the gab bangs back on a blind shaft.

To lift to leave from treasures of man is pleasing death
That will rake at last all currencies of the marked breath
And count the taken, forsaken mysteries in a bad dark.

To surrender now is to pay the expensive ogre twice.
Ancient woods of my blood, dash down to the nut of the seas
If I take to burn or return this world which is each man's
work.