437 Death poems

When the beautiful young man drowned— accidentally, swimming at dawn in a current too swift for him, or obedient to some cult of total immersion that promised the bather would come up divine, mortality rinsed from him— Hadrian placed his image everywhere, a marble Antinoüs staring across the public squares where a few dogs always scuffled, planted in every squalid little crossroads at the furthest corners of the Empire. What do we want in any body but the world? And if the lover’s inimitable form was nowhere, then he would find it everywhere, though the boy became simply more dead as the sculptors embodied him. Wherever Hadrian might travel, the beloved figure would be there first: the turn of his shoulders, the exact marble nipples, the drowned face not really lost to the Nile—which has no appetite, merely takes in anything without judgment or expectation— but lost into its own multiplication, an artifice rubbed with oils and acid so that the skin might shine. Which of these did I love? Here is his hair, here his hair again. Here the chiseled liquid waist I hold because I cannot hold it. If only one of you

Highlight Actions Enable or disable annotations 1. A cardinal hurls itself at my window all morning long, trying so hard to penetrate its own reflection I almost let it in myself, though once I saw another red bird, crazed by the walls of a room, spatter its feathers all over the house. 2. My whole childhood is coming apart, the last stitches about to be ripped out with your death, and I will be left—ridiculous, to write condolence letters to myself. 3. The deathwatch beetle deathwatch beetle A small beetle which sounds like a ticking watch when boring into wood earned its name not from its ugliness or our terror of insects but simply because of the sound it makes, ticking. 4. When your spirit perfects itself, will it escape out of a nostril, or through the spiral spiral / passage Refers to the cochlea of the inner ear passage spiral / passage Refers to the cochlea of the inner ear of an ear? Or is it even now battering against your thin skull, wild to get through, blood brother to this crimson bird?

And who shall separate the dust What later we shall be: Whose keen discerning eye will scan And solve the mystery? The high, the low, the rich, the poor, The black, the white, the red, And all the chromatique between, Of whom shall it be said: Here lies the dust of Africa; Here are the sons of Rome; Here lies the one unlabelled, The world at large his home! Can one then separate the dust? Will mankind lie apart, When life has settled back again The same as from the start?

Night the First By Nature's law, what may be, may be now; There's no prerogative in human hours: In human hearts what bolder thought can rise, Than man's presumption on tomorrow's dawn? Where is tomorrow? In another world. For numbers this is certain; the reverse Is sure to none; and yet on this perhaps, This peradventure, infamous for lies, As on a rock of adamant we build Our mountain hopes; spin out eternal schemes, As we the fatal sisters would outspin, And, big with life's futurities, expire. Not even Philander had bespoke his shroud; Nor had he cause, a warning was denied; How many fall as sudden, not as safe? As sudden, though for years admonished home: Of human ills the last extreme beware, Beware, Lorenzo! a slow-sudden death. How dreadful that deliberate surprise? Be wise today, 'tis madness to defer; Next day the fatal precedent will plead; Thus on, till wisdom is pushed out of life: Procrastination is the thief of time, Year after year it steals, till all are fled, And to the mercies of a moment leaves The vast concerns of an eternal scene. If not so frequent, would not this be strange? That 'tis so frequent, this is stranger still. Of man's miraculous mistakes, this bears The palm, "That all men are about to live," For ever on the brink of being born: All pay themselves the compliment to think They, one day, shall not drivel; and their pride On this reversion takes up ready praise; At least, their own; their future selves applauds; How excellent that life they ne'er will lead? Time lodged in their own hands is folly's vails; That lodged in Fate's, to wisdom they consign; The thing they can't but purpose, they postpone; 'Tis not in folly, not to scorn a fool; And scarce in human wisdom to do more: All promise is poor dilatory man, And that through every stage: when young, indeed, In full content, we sometimes nobly rest, Unanxious for ourselves; and only wish, As duteous sons, our fathers were more wise: At thirty man suspects himself a fool; Knows it at forty, and reforms his plan; At fifty chides his infamous delay, Pushes his prudent purpose to resolve; In all the magnanimity of thought Resolves, and re-resolves:then dies the same.

Lo! ’t is a gala night Within the lonesome latter years! An angel throng, bewinged, bedight In veils, and drowned in tears, Sit in a theatre, to see A play of hopes and fears, While the orchestra breathes fitfully The music of the spheres. Mimes, in the form of God on high, Mutter and mumble low, And hither and thither fly— Mere puppets they, who come and go At bidding of vast formless things That shift the scenery to and fro, Flapping from out their Condor wings Invisible Wo! That motley drama—oh, be sure It shall not be forgot! With its Phantom chased for evermore By a crowd that seize it not, Through a circle that ever returneth in To the self-same spot, And much of Madness, and more of Sin, And Horror the soul of the plot. But see, amid the mimic rout, A crawling shape intrude! A blood-red thing that writhes from out The scenic solitude! It writhes!—it writhes!—with mortal pangs The mimes become its food, And seraphs sob at vermin fangs In human gore imbued. Out—out are the lights—out all! And, over each quivering form, The curtain, a funeral pall, Comes down with the rush of a storm, While the angels, all pallid and wan, Uprising, unveiling, affirm That the play is the tragedy, “Man,” And its hero, the Conqueror Worm.

Not in that wasted garden Where bodies are drawn into grass That feeds no flocks, and into evergreens That bear no fruit — There where along the shaded walks Vain sighs are heard, And vainer dreams are dreamed Of close communion with departed souls — But here under the apple tree I loved and watched and pruned With gnarled hands In the long, long years; Here under the roots of this northern-spy To move in the chemic change and circle of life, Into the soil and into the flesh of the tree, And into the living epitaphs Of redder apples!

When Abraham Lincoln was shoveled into the tombs, he forgot the copperheads and the assassin ... in the dust, in the cool tombs. And Ulysses Grant lost all thought of con men and Wall Street, cash and collateral turned ashes ... in the dust, in the cool tombs. Pocahontas’ body, lovely as a poplar, sweet as a red haw in November or a pawpaw in May, did she wonder? does she remember? ... in the dust, in the cool tombs? Take any streetful of people buying clothes and groceries, cheering a hero or throwing confetti and blowing tin horns ... tell me if the lovers are losers ... tell me if any get more than the lovers ... in the dust ... in the cool tombs.

Do not imagine you can abdicate Auden Prologue If the sea could dream, and if the sea were dreaming now, the dream would be the usual one: Of the Flesh. The letter written in the dream would go something like:Forgive me—love, Blue. * I. The Viewing (A Chorus) O what, then, did he look like? He had a good body. And how came you to know this? His body was naked. Say the sound of his body. His body was quiet. Say again—quiet? He was sleeping. You are sure of this? Sleeping? Inside it, yes. Inside it. * II. Pavilion Sometimes, a breeze: a canvas flap will rise and, inside, someone stirs;a bird? a flower? One is thinking Should there be thirst, I have only to reach for the swollen bag of skin beside me, I have only to touch my mouth that is meant for a flower to it, and drink.

For Thomas Lux I heard them, far-off, deep calling from behind death’s invisible floor door. Their wallow metronome from the after-rain mud was one giant body. Arizona’s yellow arm’s length of light all the way to my own body standing at the edge of their field held me. I moved toward them and they toward me, as if to ask for something from nothing, as memory does, each face dumbfounded    ...    dumb and found by the timeframe of my own fear, surrounded at dusk. There was a plastic grocery bag, its ghost body cornered small against a tree, and there was a heavy smell. Desolation is equal to contained energy now. Their heavy bodies slow toward me, my own slow inside their circle without kulning. Kulning is a Swedish song for cows, not a pillowcase pulled over the head. Here, the mountains could be seen from far away. There’s an abandoned physics, a floor door, my own head-call herding me, in-hearing nothing but them. Bone for bone’s female indicates the inside of the mouth when singing is grief alone and is curved. You can’t stop shifting no matter how slow. It sounds like confusion in one direction. I wanted to tell you this in your absence. It sounds like the oak, it sounds like the oak of floorboards in God’s head.

Sunset and evening star, And one clear call for me! And may there be no moaning of the bar, When I put out to sea, But such a tide as moving seems asleep, Too full for sound and foam, When that which drew from out the boundless deep Turns again home. Twilight and evening bell, And after that the dark! And may there be no sadness of farewell, When I embark; For tho' from out our bourne of Time and Place The flood may bear me far, I hope to see my Pilot face to face When I have crost the bar.