. . . and the children's teeth shall be set on edge.
I see him old, trapped in a burly
Cold in the angry spitting of a
Come down these sixty years. Why
Astride the threshold do I wait,
The ice softly pendent on his broken temple?
Upon the silence I cast the mesh of
By which the gentler convergences of the
Scatter untokened, mercilessly estopped.
Why so illegal these tears?
The years' incertitude
The dirty white fates
Blackly down the necessary
Define no attitude to the present winter,
No mood to the cold matter. (I remember my mother, my mother,
A stiff wind halted outside,
In the hard ear my
Was a far shore
With invisible seas)When tomorrow pleads the mortal
Sifting rankly out of time's sieve today,
No words differently will be
Nor stuttered, like sheep astray.
A pauper in the swift
Of a bald cliff with a proper name, having
As strumpets only,
I cannot beat
Invincible modes of the sea, hearing:
Be a man my son by God. He turned
To the purring jet yellowing the murder story,
Deaf to the pathos circling in the air.
