Classic Poem

Your hands, strewn on the sheets, were my dead leaves,
And how my autumn loved your spring!
A door in the wind of memory heaves
And banging, shuts on everything.

I left you, selfish, to your lying sleep
Where dreams destroyed all trace of you.
But you believed in them. It's sad to creep
About a dreamer's world untrue.

And how fully you became this other,
Abstracted from your proper frame!
You were all stone. It's hard for a lover
To cherish memory's mere name.

Awake, unmoved, I made my final call
On every once familiar place.
Such fond returnings stirred me not at all
Here with my hands cupping my face.

And I came back from voyaging so dead
Drearily to rediscover
Your great and open hand, your eyes of lead,
Night in the mouth of my lover.

And like that eagle with two heads were we,
Or Janus of the double face,
Like Siamese twins gaped at for a fee,
Or books by stitching held in place.

We were a beast called Joy made from love's play,
Bristling with shaggy locks. He cried,
And, mad at being his own prey,
With self-devouring slowly died.

But what are friendship's acres of despair
Across which anxious lovers creep?
What is this labyrinth where all our care
Is to rejoin ourselves in sleep?

And then, what have I found — and what's to be?
I sleep, though not to sleep were due,
But if I rest I know I can be free
Of dreams in which I'm losing you.

God, how beautiful the unsullied face
Where sleep, death's copyist of old,
Embalms and polishes, repaints the grace
Of Egypt's sleepers lapped in gold.

But as I watched you, masked by your own skin,
Insensible to all our smart,
The remnant of your shadow grew more thin
And hid itself within my heart.

Friendship divine is never of this world
Which always finds it a surprise;
And ever in destruction's maw is hurled
All friendship found, all loving guise.

Time counts no longer in our monastery.
What is the time and what the day?
And when love comes, instead of subtlety
We blab it quickly where we may.

I run; and you, you run another way.
Where are you going and where I?
Alas, we're not a monster from Cathay
A flautist from a Hindu sky.

Tangled as one in your climactic moan
Ah, lovers, lovers, happy pain . . .
You are a monstrous gargoyle carved in stone
Crouching on a medieval fane.

We are one body knotted by our hearts
(Thus the body is asserted)
Our only hell's a hell where no flame darts,
A void for all the stumbling dead.

Leaning nearer, I see your temples beat
And show you are a thing of blood.
Your blood is that red sea where my soul's fleet
Is moored. You don't look on that flood.

While I recrossed the ice of history
You went to where your dreams behold
The sunlight glinting on the silken sea
Reflected on the ceiling, cold.

And that is what your inner glance could see.
I only had to shake your arm
To wake you and so ruin utterly
Perfection built from sleeper's calm.

I sat in silence watching you: your knee
On your elbow, chin in the air.
I could not have you, nothing welded me
To your mechanic body there.

I dreamed, you dreamed, and all went round and round,
Both blood and constellated stars,
While that false being Time was gaining ground
And nations wrecked themselves with wars.

The creases of your clothes just idly tossed,
The little folds where shadows run,
Were like those bodies which the holocaust
Has changed to scarecrows everyone.

And there, far from the bed, a single shoe
Though dying had a little life . . .
How such disorders showed the wounded you!
What sleeper could repair such strife?

It extended you, it copied your way.
I understood you from it. One
Just looking at your vest could really say
It was going to fire a gun.

And when about us suicide or theft
Turned a villa into a tomb,
Absorbing horror, your calm face was left
A home for harbingers of doom.

And now I go my way as wracked with dreams
As when I sang Monastic Chant .
My span of life contracts while sunlight seems
To lengthen out my shadow's slant.

I knew this shade in all that came to hand
And knew its gait as all I had;
And there before me on the desert sand
My shade at evening's stretched and sad.

The shade accuses now my body's plight;
But what can compensate its lack?
Unless the sun or moon with rising light
Can throw my shade behind my back?

The sky is riddled with chimeric stars,
With human eagles in alarm.
I will not rouse your self-destructive wars
But let the sunlight quiet your harm.