Nor any eyes

To sharpen on the stars’

Wide heaven-holding,

Only the sound

Long sibilant-muscled trees

Were lifting up, the black poplars.

And in their blazing solitude

The stars sang in their sockets through the night:

‘Blow bright, blow bright

The coal of this unquickened world.’

XII

Like the train’s beat

Like the train’s beat

Swift language flutters the lips

Of the Polish airgirl in the corner seat.

The swinging and narrowing sun

Lights her eyelashes, shapes

Her sharp vivacity of bone.

Hair, wild and controlled, runs back:

And gestures like these English oaks

Flash past the windows of her foreign talk.

The train runs on through wilderness

Of cities. Still the hammered miles

Diversify behind her face.

And all humanity of interest

Before her angled beauty falls,

As whorling notes are pressed

In a bird’s throat, issuing meaningless

Through written skies; a voice

Watering a stony place.

XIII

I put my mouth

I put my mouth

Close to running water:

Flow north, flow south,

It will not matter,

It is not love you will find.

I told the wind:

It took away my words:

It is not love you will find,

Only the bright-tongued birds,

Only a moon with no home.

It is not love you will find:

You have no limbs

Crying for stillness, you have no mind

Trembling with seraphim,

You have no death to come.

XIV

Nursery Tale

All I remember is

The horseman, the moonlit hedges,

The hoofbeats shut suddenly in the yard,

The hand finding the door unbarred:

And I recall the room where he was brought,

Hung black and candlelit; a sort

Of meal laid out in mockery; for though

His place was set, there was no more

Than one unpolished pewter dish, that bore

The battered carcase of a carrion crow.

So every journey that I make

Leads me, as in the story he was led,

To some new ambush, to some fresh mistake:

So every journey I begin foretells

A weariness of daybreak, spread

With carrion kisses, carrion farewells.

XV

The Dancer

Butterfly

Or falling leaf,

Which ought I to imitate

In my dancing?

And if she were to admit

The world weaved by her feet

Is leafless, is incomplete?

And if she abandoned it,

Broke the pivoted dance,

Set loose the audience?

Then would the moon go raving,

The moon, the anchorless

Moon go swerving

Down at the earth for a catastrophic kiss.

XVI

The bottle is drunk out by one

The bottle is drunk out by one;

At two, the book is shut;

At three, the lovers lie apart,

Love and its commerce done;

And now the luminous watch-hands

Show after four o’clock,

Time of night when straying winds

Trouble the dark.

And I am sick for want of sleep;

So sick, that I can half-believe

The soundless river pouring from the cave

Is neither strong, nor deep;

Only an image fancied in conceit.

I lie and wait for morning, and the birds,

The first steps going down the unswept street,