Hymn

Less the shadow than you a stag, sudden, through it. Less the stag breaking cover than the antlers, with which crowned. Less the antlers as trees leafless, to either side of the stag’s head, than— between them—the vision that must mean, surely, rescue. Less the rescue. More, always, the ache toward it. When I think of death, the gleam of the world darkening, dark, gathering me now in, it is lately as one more of many other nights figured with the inevitably black car, again the stranger’s strange room entered not for prayer but for striking prayer’s attitude, the body kneeling, bending, until it finds the muscled patterns that predictably, given strain and release, flesh assumes. When I think of desire, it is in the same way that I do God: as parable, any steep and blue water, things that are always there, they only wait to be sounded. And I a stone that, a little bit, perhaps should ask pardon. My fears—when I have fears— are of how long I shall be, falling, and in my at last resting how indistinguishable, inasmuch as they are countless, sire, all the unglittering other dropped stones.