Classic Poem

Walking, that is, with one foot in the grave
Produces the iambic pulse, more leap
Than limp (limping now and then, even so),
The fixed foot like a lighthouse for the other,
Which tacks all ways but adds up to a circle
When all the parallelograms are balanced.

As the moon moves in orbit around the earth
That moves in orbit around the sun, so blood
Circulates through the body that circulates
Around the grave that craters a stretch of earth
In the spell of the lunar future, soon or less

Soon. So say that I say what I say today
As a fixed function of a floating fall. . . .
A perfect pearl set in an ideal ring
Still on the finger of an early corpse
Now gone to bone, bone gone in turn to air,
But ever atom royal nonetheless.