night pick us up with much else, carry
Some distance, so all the pain and fear
Will never be heard by anybody. Gasping
On your porch, but I look to new season
Which is exactly lost. “I am the knight,
I come by night.” We will say all these
To the other, in turn. And now impatient for
Sleep will have strayed over the
Frontier to pass the time, and it might
As well, dried baby’s breath stuck in an old
Bottle, and no man puts out to sea from these
Coves, secure or not, dwelling in persuasion.
SHE
It’s as I thought: there there is
Nothing solid, nothing one can build on. The
Force may have ebbed in the green wood.
Here is nothing, not even
Lazy slipping away, feeling of being abandoned, a
Distant curl of smoke above a car
Graveyard. Instead, the shadows stand
Straight out. Uninvited, light grabs its due;
What is eaten away becomes etched impression
Of mutability, but nothing backs it up.
We may as well begin the litany here:
How all that forgotten past seasons us, prepares
Us for each other, now that the mathematics
Of winter is starting to point it out.
HE
It is true, a truer story.
Self-knowledge frosts each action, each step taken
Freely. Life is a living picture.
Alone, I can bind you like a pleated scarf
But beyond that is much that might be
Examined for the purpose of examining it.
The ends stream back in the wind, it is too dark
To see them but I can feel them.
As Naming-of-Cares you precede the objection
To each, implying a Land of Cockaigne
Syndrome. You get around this as though
The eternally revised geography of spring meant
Something beyond its own sense of exaltation,
And love were cause for self-congratulation.
SHE
I might hide somewhere. I want to fly but keep
My morality, motley as it is, just by
Encouraging these branching diversions around an axis.
So when suddenly a cloud blackens the whole
Day just before noon, this is merely
Timing. So even when darkness swings further
Back, it indicates, must indicate, an order,
Albeit a restricted one, which tends to prove that idle
Civilizations once existed under a loose heading like
“The living and the dead.” To learn more
Isn’t my way, and anyway the dark green
Ring around the basin postulates
More than the final chapter of this intriguing
Unfinished last chapter. It’s in the public domain.
HE
But you will take comfort in it again.
Others, patient murderers, cultivated,
Sympathetic, in time will have subtly
Switched the background from parallel rain-lines
To the ambiguities of “the deep,” and in
Doing so will have wheeled an equestrian statue up
Against the sky’s facade, the eye of God, cantering
So as not to fall back nor yet trample the cold
Pourings of sunlight. You will have the look
Reflected on your face. The great squash domes seem
To vindicate us all, yet belong to no one.
Meanwhile others will grow up and fuck and
Get older, beating like weeds against the door,
But this wasn’t anticipated. You caught them off guard.
SHE
What I hear scraping at the door
Is palaver of multitudes who decided to come back,
Having set out too soon, and something must be
Done about them, names must be written down,
Or simply by being hoarse one whole side
Of the world won’t count any more,
The side with the story of our lives
And our relatives’ on it, the memory
Of the day you bicycled over.
But the reason for the even, tawny flow
Of the morning as it turned was the thought of riding
Back down all those hills that were so hard
To get up, and climbing the ones you had
Coasted down before, like mirror-writing.
HE
And when the flourish under the signature,
A miniature beehive with a large bee on it, was
Finished, you chose a view of distant factories,
Tall smokestacks, anything. It didn’t matter
So long as it was emptied of all but a drop
At the bottom like the medicine bottle that is thrown away.
The catch in the voice goes out of style then,
The period of civilities is
Some distance, so all the pain and fear
Will never be heard by anybody. Gasping
On your porch, but I look to new season
Which is exactly lost. “I am the knight,
I come by night.” We will say all these
To the other, in turn. And now impatient for
Sleep will have strayed over the
Frontier to pass the time, and it might
As well, dried baby’s breath stuck in an old
Bottle, and no man puts out to sea from these
Coves, secure or not, dwelling in persuasion.
SHE
It’s as I thought: there there is
Nothing solid, nothing one can build on. The
Force may have ebbed in the green wood.
Here is nothing, not even
Lazy slipping away, feeling of being abandoned, a
Distant curl of smoke above a car
Graveyard. Instead, the shadows stand
Straight out. Uninvited, light grabs its due;
What is eaten away becomes etched impression
Of mutability, but nothing backs it up.
We may as well begin the litany here:
How all that forgotten past seasons us, prepares
Us for each other, now that the mathematics
Of winter is starting to point it out.
HE
It is true, a truer story.
Self-knowledge frosts each action, each step taken
Freely. Life is a living picture.
Alone, I can bind you like a pleated scarf
But beyond that is much that might be
Examined for the purpose of examining it.
The ends stream back in the wind, it is too dark
To see them but I can feel them.
As Naming-of-Cares you precede the objection
To each, implying a Land of Cockaigne
Syndrome. You get around this as though
The eternally revised geography of spring meant
Something beyond its own sense of exaltation,
And love were cause for self-congratulation.
SHE
I might hide somewhere. I want to fly but keep
My morality, motley as it is, just by
Encouraging these branching diversions around an axis.
So when suddenly a cloud blackens the whole
Day just before noon, this is merely
Timing. So even when darkness swings further
Back, it indicates, must indicate, an order,
Albeit a restricted one, which tends to prove that idle
Civilizations once existed under a loose heading like
“The living and the dead.” To learn more
Isn’t my way, and anyway the dark green
Ring around the basin postulates
More than the final chapter of this intriguing
Unfinished last chapter. It’s in the public domain.
HE
But you will take comfort in it again.
Others, patient murderers, cultivated,
Sympathetic, in time will have subtly
Switched the background from parallel rain-lines
To the ambiguities of “the deep,” and in
Doing so will have wheeled an equestrian statue up
Against the sky’s facade, the eye of God, cantering
So as not to fall back nor yet trample the cold
Pourings of sunlight. You will have the look
Reflected on your face. The great squash domes seem
To vindicate us all, yet belong to no one.
Meanwhile others will grow up and fuck and
Get older, beating like weeds against the door,
But this wasn’t anticipated. You caught them off guard.
SHE
What I hear scraping at the door
Is palaver of multitudes who decided to come back,
Having set out too soon, and something must be
Done about them, names must be written down,
Or simply by being hoarse one whole side
Of the world won’t count any more,
The side with the story of our lives
And our relatives’ on it, the memory
Of the day you bicycled over.
But the reason for the even, tawny flow
Of the morning as it turned was the thought of riding
Back down all those hills that were so hard
To get up, and climbing the ones you had
Coasted down before, like mirror-writing.
HE
And when the flourish under the signature,
A miniature beehive with a large bee on it, was
Finished, you chose a view of distant factories,
Tall smokestacks, anything. It didn’t matter
So long as it was emptied of all but a drop
At the bottom like the medicine bottle that is thrown away.
The catch in the voice goes out of style then,
The period of civilities is
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