A Pauper

. . . 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.