The dishes – only two plates now, two glasses,

Two knives, two forks, two spoons – small work for two.

She sits with her hands folded in her lap,

At rest. He smokes his pipe. They do not speak.

And when they speak at last it is to say

What each one knows the other knows. They have

One mind between them, now that finally,

For all its knowing will not exactly know

Which one goes first through the dark doorway, bidding

Goodnight, and which sits on a while alone.

XIX.

Some Sunday afternoon, it may be,

you are sitting under your porch roof,

looking down through the trees

to the river, watching the rain. The circles

made by the raindrops’ striking

expand, intersect, dissolve,

and suddenly (for you are getting on

now, and much of your life is memory)

the hands of the dead, who have been here

with you, rest upon you tenderly

as the rain rests shining

upon the leaves. And you think then

(for thought will come) of the strangeness

of the thought of Heaven, for now

you have imagined yourself there,

remembering with longing this

happiness, this rain. Sometimes here

we are there, and there is no death.

XX.

Even while I dreamed I prayed that what I saw was only fear

and no foretelling,

for I saw the last known landscape destroyed for the sake

of the objective, the soil bulldozed, the rock blasted.

Those who had wanted to go home would never get there

now.

I visited the offices where for the sake of the objective the

planners planned

at blank desks set in rows. I visited the loud factories

where the machines were made that would drive ever

forward

toward the objective. I saw the forest reduced to stumps and

gullies; I saw

the poisoned river, the mountain cast into the valley;

I came to the city that nobody recognized because it looked

like every other city.

I saw the passages worn by the unnumbered

footfalls of those whose eyes were fixed upon the objective.

Their passing had obliterated the graves and the

monuments

of those who had died in pursuit of the objective

and who had long ago forever been forgotten, according

to the inevitable rule that those who have forgotten forget

that they have forgotten. Men, women, and children now

pursued the objective

as if nobody ever had pursued it before.

The races and the sexes now intermingled perfectly in

pursuit of the objective.

The once-enslaved, the once-oppressed were now free

to sell themselves to the highest bidder

and to enter the best-paying prisons

in pursuit of the objective, which was the destruction of all

enemies,

which was the destruction of all obstacles, which was the

destruction of all objects,

which was to clear the way to victory which was to clear the

way to promotion, to salvation, to progress,

to the completed sale, to the signature

on the contract, which was to clear the way