They have been no longer than usual, in coming to this place.

Terror of time, they murmur, equals the terror of space.

All cancels out, in the end, they say, and the end is nothing.

And all between, a nothing in borrowed clothing.

Here we have stars, even of the first magnitude,

(how flattering our human terms) doomed to decrepitude:

all things, even the little atom, in its slow dying, arrive here,

and then slip silently—ward to a predestined year.

Who would plant trees, here? Is it an honest man?

Would he shade coming chaos in his wistful plan?

God knows, not we. At least, we plant no tree.

We only wait in the Absolute, and see.

Yes, Old Repetition, they have been no longer than usual.

Only to itself, perhaps, does time’s cycle seem casual.

And space, this horrid cloaca which we must share,

finds no mirror in which to face its face in when or where.

Not in us, surely? But perhaps in these, who seem

the endless repetition of our dream:

cold algebra brought round again in a concentric hell,

convolute whirlwind in an invisible shell.

How vast, how still, how slow! We sleep, and wake, and then,

cloud-walking, see our dream flow past again.

They have been no longer than usual, this time, in coming.

Here are the shadows of spokes, the wheels are humming.

Street-lights, and neon monsters, glare on the cloud.

From violet dynamos, an endless belt, pours out the crowd.

And all at once: dim past, faint future, all at once:

the moral histories, the cracked applause, the festered battle-fronts:

the corner drug-store, where the lyric cash-tray sings,

and the amateur astronomer, peeping at Saturn’s rings.

But this is not all. By no means, nol This is not all.

No, choose your own show, midway or sideshow: from Adam’s Fall

to ill-starred Lucifer, or the blind poet’s dictated dream.

O purblind, blind, panhandler of the siltage in time’s stream.