Tenth Elegy 2007

THE TENTH ELEGY (2007)

X 1 Let me one day, at the outcome of wrathful

X 2 insight, sing rejoicing and fame up to concurring angels.

X 3 Of the clear-beaten hammers of the heart,

X 4 let none falter on slack, doubting, or

X 5 breaking strings. Let my streaming visage

X 6 make me more lustrous: let unembellished weeping

X 7 bloom. O how you will then, nights, be dear to me,

X 8 afflicted ones! That I didn’t accept you more kneelingly, inconsolable

X 9 sisters, that to your untrammelled

X 10 hair I didn’t surrender less trammelled!

X 11 We, squanderers of pains. How we foresee their sorrowful duration,

X 12 whether perhaps they will end. Yet they are really

X 13 our winter-long foliage, our sombre myrtle,

X 14 one of the seasons of the secret year —, not just

X 15 time —, they are location, settlement, campsite, soil, residence.

X 16 To be sure, alas, how strange are the lanes of the City of Sufferance,

X 17 where in the false stillness made of overwhelmed

X 18 sound, strongly, out of the mold of the emptiness, the molding

X 19 exults the gold-plated clamour, the exploding monument.

X 20 Oh, how trace-less an angel would stamp out their market place of consolement

X 21 that borders the church they bought ready-made:

X 22 tidy and closed and disappointed like a post-office on Sunday.

X 23 Outside, however, are always ruffling the carnival’s edges.

X 24 Seesaws of freedom! Divers and jugglers of zeal!

X 25 And prettified happiness’s figure-filled shooting-gallery

X 26 that twitches with target and behaves metallically

X 27 when a man with more skill makes a hit. From applause to chance laws

X 28 he staggers onward; for booths of each curiosity

X 29 canvass, beat the drum, and shout. For adults however,

X 30 is to be specially watched: how money procreates anatomically,

X 31 not just an amusement: the genital organs of money,

X 32 all that, the whole, the process —, that instructs and makes

X 33 fruitful…....

X 34 Oh but right beyond this,

X 35 beyond the last plank pasted up with posters for “Fate of Death”,

X 36 that bitter beer that seems sweet to the drinkers,

X 37 if they always chew fresh distractions with it…

X 38 just in back of the plank, just beyond, things are real.

X 39 Children are playing, and lovers holding each other, — off to the side,

X 40 gravely, in the scanty grass, and dogs have nature.

X 41 The youth is drawn onward; perhaps he’s enamoured of a young

X 42 Lament. Follows her off across meadows. She says:

X 43 “Far away. We live out there”… “Where?^” And the youth

X 44 follows. He’s touched by her stature, The shoulders, the neck, — perhaps

X 45 she's of lordly descent. But he leaves her, turns round,

X 46 turns back. Waves…What’s the use? She’s a Lament.

X 47 Only those who died young, in the first phase

X 48 of timeless indifference, of unaccustoming,

X 49 follow her lovingly. Maids

X 50 she awaits and befriends them. Shows them quietly

X 51 what she is wearing. Pearls of sufferance and the finespun

X 52 veils of affliction. — With youths she walks

X 53 in silence.

X 54 But there where they reside in the valley, one of the elder

X 55 Laments takes charge of the youth when he asks. “We were”,

X 56 she says, “a great race once, we Laments. Our forefathers

X 57 worked the mines there in the vast mountain range; among humans

X 58 you find sometimes a fragment of polished aboriginal sufferance,

X 59 or, from an old volcano, cindery petrified wrath.

X 60 Yes, that came from there. Long ago we were wealthy.”

X 61 And she guides him lightly through the wide landscape of the Laments,

X 62 shows him the columns of temples or the ruins

X 63 of those castles from whence the Princes of the Laments

X 64 long ago ruled the land wisely. Shows him the tall

X 65 tear-trees and the fields of blossoming melancholy

X 66 (the living know them only as gentle foliage):

X 67 shows him the animals of sorrow, grazing, — and sometimes

X 68 a bird startles up and draws, horizontally through the uplifted gaze,

X 69 far and wide the inscribed sign of its solitary cry. —

X 70 In the evening she leads him off to the graves of the ancestors

X 71 of the race of Laments, the Sibyls and Warning Lords.

X 72 Yet as night draws nigh, they walk on more quietly, and soon

X 73 it moons upward, the all-

X 74 watching grave-marker. Brother to that on the Nile ,

X 75 the sublime Sphinx —: the reticent chamber’s visage.

X 76 And they marvel at the crown-bearing head that,for all time,

X 77 silently placed humanity's face

X 78 on the scales of the stars.

X 79 His gaze can’t encompass it, in early death,

X 80 dizzy. But their gazing

X 81 from behind the Pshent-crown’s rim startles the owl. And it,

X 82 skimming in a slow stroke along the cheek,

X 83 that of the most mature roundedness,

X 84 designs lithely upon the newly

X 85 deceased’s hearing, across a page

X 86 opened double, the indescribable outline.

X 87 And higher, the stars. New ones. The stars of the Land of Sufferance.

X 88 Slowly, the Lament names them: "Here,

X 89 see: the Rider, the Staff and the more full constellation

X 90 they call Wreath of Fruit. Then, onward, toward nearer the pole:

X 91 Cradle; Pathway; The Burning Book; Puppet; Window.

X 92 But in the southern sky, pure as the palm

X 93 of a blessed hand, the lucidly radiating lustrous ‘M’

X 94 that signifies the Mothers…—

X 95 But the deceased must depart, and silently the elder

X 96 Lament brings him as far as the valley's chasm,

X 97 where there shimmers in moonlight:

X 98 the Spring of Joy. With reverence

X 99 she utters its name, says: "Among humans

X 100 it is a sustaining river."

X 101 They stand at the foot of the mountain range.

X 102 And there she embraces him, weeping.

X 103 Alone, he ascends off into the Mountains of Aboriginal Sufferance.

X 104 And not even his step resounds off the toneless doom.

* * *

X 105 But should they awaken for us, the endlessly dead, a parable,

X 106 see, they would point perhaps to the aments of the bare

X 107 hazel tree hanging down,

X 108 or indicate rain that falls on the dark realm of earth in the spring. —

X 109 And we, who conceive of rising happiness,

X 110 would sense the poignancy

X 111 that almost confounds us

X 112 when a happy thing falls.