Shot from the sling into the perilous road,

The hundred mile long hurtling bowling alley,

To-day I saw you pass full tilt for the jack.

Or it seemed a race beyond Time’s gate you rode,

Trussed to the motor cycle, shoulder and head

Fastened to flying fate, so that your back

Left nothing but a widening wake of dumb

Scornful oblivion. It was you, yet some

Soft finger somewhere turned a different day,

The day I left you in that narrow valley,

Close to my foot, but already far away;

And I remembered you were seven years dead.

Yet you were there so clearly, I could not tell

For a moment in the hot still afternoon

What world I walked in, since it held us two,

A dead and a living man. Had I cracked the shell

That hides the secret souls, had I fallen through,

I idly wondered, and in so falling found

The land where life’s untraceable truants run

Hunting a halting stage? Was this the ground

That stretched beyond the span-wide world-wide ditch,

So like the ground I knew, yet so unlike,

Because it said “Again”, all this again,

The flying road, the motionless house again,

And, stretched between, the tension of your face—

As you ran in dust the burning comet’s race

Athirst for the ease of ash—the eating itch

To be elsewhere, nowhere, the driving pain

Clamping the shoulders back? Was death’s low dike

So easy to leap as this and so commonplace,

A jump from here through here straight into here,

An operation to make you what you were

Before, no better or worse? And yet the fear?

The clock-hand moved, the street slipped into its place,

Two cars went by. A chance face flying past

Had started it all and made a hole in space,

The hole you looked through always. I knew at last

The sight you saw there, the terror and mystery

Of unrepeatable life so plainly given

To you half wrapped still in eternity,

Who had come by such a simple road from heaven;

So that you did not need to have the story

Retold, or bid the heavy world turn again,

But felt the terror of the trysting place,

The crowning test, the treachery and the glory.