Louis Untermeyer

Eleven o’clock, and the curtain falls. The cold wind tears the strands of illusion; The delicate music is lost In the blare of home-going crowds And a midnight paper. The night has grown martial; It meets us with blows and disaster. Even the stars have turned shrapnel, Fixed in silent explosions. And here at our door The moonlight is laid Like a drawn sword.

The brain forgets but the blood will remember. There, when the play of sense is over, The last, low spark in the darkest chamber Will hold all there is of love and lover. The war of words, the life-long quarrel Of self against self will resolve into nothing; Less than the chain of berry-red coral Crying against the dead black of her clothing. What has the brain that it hopes to last longer? The blood will take from forgotten violence, The groping, the break of her voice in anger. There will be left only color and silence. These will remain, these will go searching Your veins for life when the flame of life smolders; The night that you two saw the mountains marching Up against dawn with the stars on their shoulders; The jetting poplars’ arrested fountains As you drew her under them, easing her pain; The notes, not the words, of a half-finished sentence; The music, the silence. . . . These will remain.

(Vienna) I Shut out the light or let it filter through These frowning aisles as penitentially As though it walked in sackcloth. Let it be Laid at the feet of all that ever grew Twisted and false, like this rococo shrine Where cupids smirk from candy clouds and where The Lord, with polished nails and perfumed hair, Performs a parody of the divine. The candles hiss; the organ-pedals storm; Writhing and dark, the columns leave the earth To find a lonelier and darker height. The church grows dingy while the human swarm Struggles against the impenitent body’s mirth. Ashes to ashes. . . . Go. . . . Shut out the light. (Hinterbrühl) II And so the light runs laughing from the town, Pulling the sun with him along the roads That shed their muddy rivers as he goads Each blade of grass the ice had flattened down. At every empty bush he stops to fling Handfuls of birds with green and yellow throats; While even the hens, uncertain of their notes, Stir rusty vowels in attempts to sing. He daubs the chestnut-tips with sudden reds And throws an olive blush on naked hills That hoped, somehow, to keep themselves in white. Who calls for sackcloth now? He leaps and spreads A carnival of color, gladly spills His blood: the resurrection—and the light.