1.
Just going out for a minute—
left your work (which the idle
call chaos) behind on the table.
And left the chair behind when you went where?
I ask around all Paris, for it’s
only in stories or pictures
that people rise to the skies:
where is your soul gone, where?
In the cupboard, two-doored like a shrine,
look all your books are in place.
In each line the letters are there.
Where has it gone to, your face?
Your face
your warmth
your shoulder
where did they go?
January 3, 1935
2.
Useless with eyes like nails to
penetrate the black soil.
As true as a nail in the mind
you are not here, not here.
It’s useless turning my eyes
and fumbling round the whole sky.
Rain. Pails of rain-water. But
you are not there, not there.
Neither one of the two. Bone is
too much bone. And spirit is too much spirit.
Where is the real you? All of you?
Too much here. Too much there.
And I won’t exchange you for sand
and steam. You took me for kin,
and I won’t give you up for a corpse
and a ghost: a here, and a there.
It’s not you, not you, not you,
however much priests intone
that death and life are one:
God’s too much God, worm—too much worm!
You are one thing, corpse and spirit.
We won’t give you up for the smoke of
censers
or flowers
on graves
If you are anywhere, it’s here in
us: and we honour best all those who
have gone by despising division.
It is all of you that has gone.
January 5, 1935
3.
Because once when you were young and bold
you did not leave me to rot alive among
bodies without souls or fall dead among walls
I will not let you die altogether.
Because, fresh and clean, you took me
out by the hand, to freedom and brought spring leaves
in bundles into my house I shall not
let you be grown over with weeds and forgotten.
And because you met the status of my
first grey hairs like a son with pride
greeting their terror with a child’s joy:
I shall not let you go grey into men’s hearts.
January 8, 1935
4.
The blow muffled through years of
forgetting, of not knowing:
That blow reaches me now like the song of a
woman, or like horses neighing.
Through an inert building, a song of passion and
the blow comes:
dulled by forgetfulness, by not knowing which is
a soundless thicket.
It is the sin of memory, which has no eyes or
lips or flesh or nose,
the silt of all the days and nights
we have been without each other
the blow is muffled with moss and waterweed:
so ivy devours the
core of the living thing it is ruining
—a knife through a feather bed.
Window wadding, our ears are plugged with it
and with that other wool
outside windows of snow and the weight of spiritless
years: and the blow is muffled.