I.
Take one look at that face and go your way.
Regard these lines of motionless desire
Perpetually assuaged yet unappeased,
Still yearning for what still is about to be.
What you see there is something else than beauty.
These are your lineaments, the face of life
When it is quite alone, and you forgotten.
Look once. But do not hope to find a sentence
To tell what you have seen. Stop at the colon:
And set a silence after to speak the word
That you will always seek and never find,
Perhaps, if found, the good and beautiful end.
You will not reach that place. So leave the hiatus
There in the broken sentence. What is missing
You will always think of: And do not turn again
To scan that face lest you should leave upon it
Your personal load of trouble and desire.
You cannot add to it nor take away.
All that you think or say will be a postscript
To that imperfect mystery, limping sentence.
And do not forget. But look once at that face.
II.
You in imaginary fears
Threading the terrors of a wood
That has no place but in your mind;
You hunted by the ravenous years
That send their warnings through your blood
Where fears long conquered still affright;
You willingly gone to be with blind
Tiresias in his buried night
That opens at an idle word—
You look-in wonder at the bird,
Round balk of appetite and fear,
That sings af, ease upon the branch,
Time a long silence im its ear
That never heard of time or space;
You who hear the avalanche
Must fabricate a temporal tale
To bring the timeless nightingale
And swallow to your trysting place.
III.
He is the little, sly, absconding god,
Hides in the moment. Look, and he is gone,
But turn away, and there he is back again.
He is more quick than movement,
Present and gone, absent and safe in hiding,
No spell can bind him. But idle fools and children
Take him for granted, are at their ease with him,
And he’s the true friend of the absentminded.
He is too agile for time’s dull iambics,
Lightly dives in and out of stale duration,
Poised on the endless present. There he is free,
Having no past or future. All things know him.
And then are eased as by a heavenly chance.
The greater gods sometimes in grave amusement
Smile at his tricks, yet nod in approbation.