Classic Poem

1

I say myself.
The beginning was that no saying was.
There was no beginning.
There is an end and there was no beginning.
There is a saying and there was no saying.
In the beginning God did not create.
There was no creation.
There was no God.
There was that I did not say.
I did not say because I could not say.
I could not say because I was not.
I was not because I am.
I am because I say.
I say myself.
Myself is all that was not said,
That never could be said,
Until I said " I say."
I say.
I say myself.
How am I now who was not,
Yet who never was not?
What is now?
When is now?
What am I?
Who am I?
Where is now?
Where am I?
I am, I never have not been,
Words of agreement thing with thing.
Never was there not
Final agreement thing with thing.
I say final agreement thing with thing.
I say myself.
Never was I not.
Never has there been not now.
I am now because I never was not.
I am now because time is not.
I was not because God was.
Time is God.
God was time.
Time is thing on thing.
God was disagreement thing with thing.
Never were there not things.
Never was there not
Final agreement thing with thing.
Never was there God.
God did not say.
God did not create.
Never was there creation.
Never were there not things.
Never was there not
Final agreement thing with thing.
Agreement thing with thing is to say.
Never till now has it been said.
I say.
I say myself.
What is now?
Now is myself.
Now is when I say.
What am I?
I am what I say.
Who am I?
I am I who say.
Where is now?
Now is where I am.
Where am I?
I am in what I say.
What do I say?
I say myself.
What is myself?
Myself was not God.
Myself is not time.
I say God was not and time is not.
Now is final agreement thing with thing,
Which never has been not.
Now is all things one thing.
What is a thing?
It is that which, being not myself,
Is as myself in being not myself.
What is one thing?
It is all things myself
And each as myself
And none myself.
For I alone say.
I alone say myself.
I say myself only.
There is myself to say only.
There is one thing to say only.
There is one thing only.
Myself alone is the one thing only.
I am not I.
I am the one thing only
Which each thing is
When each as all is
In being each only.
I am not I.
I am not I,
Though none other but myself am I.
I am the I which is not any one.
I am I.
I am not I.
To be myself has taken time, all time —
Has taken thing on thing, all things —
Has taken God,
Has taken thing with thing not one thing.
To be myself has taken life, thing and thing —
Has taken death, thing and thing and nothing.
To be myself has taken to be not myself.
It was not myself, it is myself.
Now is I.
I am not I.
I am now.
Before now was a world.
Now is I.
A world is a before.
A world has no beginning.
A before has no beginning.
A before always was.
A now always is.
Never was now.
Always is now.
Never was I.
Always am I.
I am whatever now is always.
I am not I.
I am not a world.
I am a woman.
I am not the sun which multiplied,
I am the moon which singled.
I am not the moon but a singling.
I am I.
I am my name.
My name is not my name,
It is the name of what I say.
My name is what is said.
I alone say.
I alone am not I.
I am my name.
My name is not my name,
My name is the name.
The name is the one word only.
The one word only is the one thing only.
The one thing only is the word which says.
The word which says is no word.
The one word only is no word.
The one word only is agreement
Word with word finally.

2

Suspicion like the earth is hard
And like the earth opposes
Dense fact to the doubtable:
Which therefore like the air surrenders
Semblance to the bolder sights.
I have surrendered place
To many solid miles of brain-rote,
To the just so many matters and no more
That reason, grudging prodigal,
Allows numerous, consecutive.
Even in my own mind I have stood last,
An airy exile, nothing, nowhere,
My eyes obeying laws of circumspection
By which myself shone fanciful
In lurid never:
Because that had been so, I not.
But as time learns a boredom,
Loathes the determinate succession,
Irks with uncalendared event
And brings surprise to be,
The natural conscience snapped in me —
And lo! I was, I am.
Elastic logic thinning
Grows delicate to marvels.
Fine argument at finest disembroils
The ravelled choking maze of caution.
The sudden of the slow is bred,
The curious of the common.
Into the sceptic fog that mists
Infraction from the chronic rule
Stumbles intelligence a-rage
To find the unthought wanton thought
And, self-confounding, think it.
My life, with other lives a world,
With other ways of being a coiled nature,
Springs separate: I am personified,
Of being caught in that pressed confluence
And proven look-substantial,
Yet strange to the familiar soul
In fellowed course entwined.
Acquaintance marks out unacquaintance.
Usage has bound of mystery.
The continents of vision view
A further which grows spatial
From lying next, in dark increase
Of the gregarious light with which
Compacting sense embraces straggling all.
Thus is reality divided
Against itself, into domestic axiom
And recondite surmise;
And joins, when near to uttermost,
When plain to covert leaps,
In one extreme of here-to-here.
I have a local likeliness,
Haunting the various neighbour-hearth;
But where the shadow is and chill
And unnamed distance fear-deep,
I also am, or was, and not, intolerably.
Must be union of body and wraith.
Wonted and wondrous must touch.
At first there's daze, habit's reluctance.
Then quivers new that which long loured archaic —
Which has the secret age enough
To open frank from bloom potential
Like the last flower of nervous chance,
And the first of far intention.
But is this I interior,
The smothered whole that lurked unlive
Till obvious fragment sought
Its late entire and matching?
Or the outer stranger, proofless,
Come from stealth into defiance
And with a heart incongruent —
Suspicion's devilish shadow
Which the lies are made of,
For truth-proud reason to declare untrue?
This is I, I: the I-thing.
It is a self-postponed exactitude,
An after-happening to happen come:
As closing calm is actual
By all the sooner winds, and these
Its wild own are, in heirship silent.
A soft word-fit ear to meet
With a monster-foreign noising —
Be it of lapsed vigours fallen
Furious at their meaning's ebb —
In the same room of sound is ominous:
There's word to be, and hearing of it
Louder than these memories
Which once, being life itself, prevented.
So have I beat against my final ear
Such whims and whirrings, stubborn echoes
Whose lost persuasion I made my own,
Whose dinning death. So have I lived,
Approaching rhythms of old circumstance
To the perilous margin, moment.
And struck the string which breaks at sounding,
Taken the tremorless note to mouth,
And spoken sound's inversion
Like a statue moved with stillness.
This is that latest all-risk:
An I which mine is for the courage
No other to be, if not danger's self.
Nor did I other become, others,
In braving all-risk with hushed step,
Mind rattling veteran armouries.
I did thus creep upon myself
A player of two parts, as woman turns
Between the lover and beloved,
So it be well — she is herself and not,
Herself and anxious love.
So it be well: the clasping, death of fear.
When passion smoothes into a face
And fright subdues from scream to voice,
And dumb eventuality
Mantles aflush with language:
So is it well, the danger.
We have rejected time,
Expelled the furtive future
From our coward lag-clock;
And nothing's left to count but now,
And now again, and then and then
That cannot but the same be,
That may not flutter strewn
To spread its gathered instantness
As it were lazy flock of bird-speed.
If this be I.
If words from earthy durance loosed
To earthy right of meaning
Cannot belie their wisdoming,
The doubt-schooled care that bent back sense
From skyish startle, faith's delirium.
If I my words am,
If the footed head which frowns them
And the handed heart which smiles them
Are the very writing, table, chair,
The paper, pen, self, taut community
Wherein enigma's orb is word-constrained.
Does myself upon the page meet,
Does the thronging firm a name
To nod my own — witnessing
I write or am this, it is written?
What thinks the world?
Has here the time-eclipsed occasion
Grown language-present?
Or does the world demand,
And what think I?
The world in me which fleet to disavow
Ordains perpetual reiteration?
And these the words ensuing.