THE STONE
THE STONE
I.
The sun goes down
Too soon, too soon.
Little comfort comes from the feeble moon.
Vast images of the Zodiac
Labor dimly overhead
Grinding flesh and spirit
Until all those images are dead.
But here the cold serenity
Of angels encompasses me.
On this long-travelled night
I welcome their solemn divinity
On this night of final prayer
When I lay myself down
To conjoin this bickering flesh
With this ghost-strewn,
This devouring ground.
Ecstasy, I abjure you!
Ambition I deny you!
Weary of fury I lay me down,
O angels, I pray you, devour me wholly:
Heart, limbs, entrails, brains and bones!
Reform me into the enduring earth;
Its silts, its sands it’s crumbled stones
That I may, for a half moment of eternity,
Be the least part of that imperturbable,
Oblivious fecundity.
Break axis and axle, Beast!
Stone, drop away!
II.
A man beats out his life
Bound in a stone-cracking job
That his image may content
A quarrelsome, indifferent mob.
Can any man but see himself
As an image in another’s eye?
No, I reject that
Though there’s more in it
Of half-truth than whole lie.
Live we by half-truths then
Since halves are all we have.
Laboring men can seem wise and content
Their images to save.
And when blood, bone and breath
Dry up and wither in a span,
When spirit murders substance
So eager it is, so insistent to be gone
Mummy-wrapped in bestial images
Does intuition of a greater purpose stir
As all things bound unravel?
Break axis and axle, Beast!
Stone, drop away!