Classic Poem

Not All Immaculate

Yet it is not all immaculate death —
Not all a folding to of covers
Punctually, by time's trembling hands.
There is (unreadable) a motley clatter
After that day of instantaneousness
Has summoned instant night from night.
There is a panic of stained steps
Along pale streets conspiring backwards
Into remembered days like bedrooms
Slow with oversleeping, timeless.
It is not all a tidy ending, dawning
Of a picture-page whereon tidily, briefly,
The world is told of by a thinnest light —
The moon-like smile of worn Forgiveness.
Against this weather-peace there cries
(Unhearable) a scarlet wind,
As the sun's bull once bellowed,
And a black rain beseeches, as earth once
In pride of ram besought itself to doubt.
This guarded day is not the whole of you,
Whose foreheads by this day resist
Nature's insanities and headaches,
The garrulous mute bodily debates.
This night which hammers brain-like
At your immune memories now
Lies far and dim, but great it lies
As far and dim, greatly unrolls
That which has been forgotten greatly.
It is not all this sheerer day.
There is that, also, which you have forgotten.
There is a blemished night abroad,
And though you lock it in itself
With lockless rigour, that it may not out
By any mercy-key of yours,
Still does it shadow the lustrated tale —
Since of you also those young chapters
Toward which, as to later lives,
Young, later selves of you go futuring.