It is better this year.

And the clothes they wear

In the gray unweeded sky of our earth

There is no possibility of change

Because all of the true fragments are here.

So I was glad of the fog’s

Taking me to you

Undetermined summer thing eaten

Of grief and passage—where you stay,

The wheel is ready to turn again.

When you have gone it will light up,

The shadow of the spokes to drown

Your departure where the summer knells

Speak to grown dawn.

There is after all a kind of promise

To the affair of the waiting weather.

We have learned not to be tired

Among the lanterns of this year of sleep

But someone pays—no transparency

Has ever hardened us before

To long piers of silence, and hedges

Of understanding, difficult passing

From one lesson to the next and the coldness

Of the consistency of our lives

Devotion to immaculate danger.

A leaf would have settled the disturbance

Of the atmosphere, but at that high

Valley’s point disbanded

Clouds that rocks smote newly

The person or persons involved

Parading slowly through the sunlit fields

Not only as though the danger did not exist

But as though the birds were in on the secret.