Row after row with strict
The headstones yield their names to the element,
The wind whirs without recollection;
In the riven troughs the splayed
Pile up, of nature the casual
To the seasonal eternity of death;
Then driven by the fierce
Of heaven to their election in the vast breath,
They sough the rumour of mortality.
Autumn is desolation in the
Of a thousand acres where these memories
From the inexhaustible bodies that are
Dead, but feed the grass row after rich row.
Think of the autumns that have come and gone!—Ambitious November with the humors of the year,
With a particular zeal for every slab,
Staining the uncomfortable angels that
On the slabs, a wing chipped here, an arm there:
The brute curiosity of an angel's
Turns you, like them, to stone,
Transforms the heaving
Till plunged to a heavier world
You shift your sea-space
Heaving, turning like the blind crab. Dazed by the wind, only the wind The leaves flying,
You know who have waited by the
The twilight certainty of an animal,
Those midnight restitutions of the
You know—the immitigable pines, the smoky
Of the sky, the sudden call: you know the rage,
The cold pool left by the mounting flood,
Of muted Zeno and Parmenides.
You who have waited for the angry
Of those desires that should be yours tomorrow,
You know the unimportant shrift of
And praise the
And praise the arrogant
Of those who
Rank upon rank, hurried beyond decision—Here by the sagging gate, stopped by the wall. Seeing, seeing only the leaves Flying, plunge and
Turn your eyes to the immoderate past,
Turn to the inscrutable infantry
Demons out of the earth—they will not last.
Stonewall,
Stonewall, and the sunken fields of hemp.
Shiloh,
Antietam,
Malvern Hill,
Bull Run.
Lost in that orient of the
You will curse the setting sun. Cursing only the leaves crying Like an old man in a
You hear the shout, the crazy hemlocks
With troubled fingers to the silence
Smothers you, a mummy, in time. The hound
Toothless and dying, in a musty
Hears the wind only. Now that the salt of their
Stiffens the saltier oblivion of the sea,
Seals the malignant purity of the flood,
What shall we who count our days and
Our heads with a commemorial
In the ribboned coats of grim felicity,
What shall we say of the bones, unclean,
Whose verdurous anonymity will grow?
The ragged arms, the ragged heads and
Lost in these acres of the insane green?
The gray lean spiders come, they come and go;
In a tangle of willows without
The singular screech-owl's
Invisible lyric seeds the
With the furious murmur of their chivalry. We shall say only the leaves Flying, plunge and
We shall say only the leaves
In the improbable mist of
That flies on multiple wing;
Night is the beginning and the
And in between the ends of
Waits mute speculation, the patient
That stones the eyes, or like the jaguar
For his own image in a jungle pool, his victim.
What shall we say who have
Carried to the heart?
Shall we take the
To the grave?
Shall we, more hopeful, set up the
In the house?
The ravenous grave? Leave
The shut gate and the decomposing wall:
The gentle serpent, green in the mulberry bush,
Riots with his tongue through the hush—Sentinel of the grave who counts us all!
