In the Night
WHEN the pillowed head instead of sleeping ponders The night is given shape by noises half expected And freed from untrue light imagination wanders To find the shape of life in violence recollected.
The tower clock in striking tells not of time so clearly When on the air we breathe impinge those bronze vibrations As of the lives we lead and ways we cherish dearly Shaken by sudden fears and wounding revelations ; As of those shocks of pleasure, a phrase, an act forbidden, That an infant hoarded up, his secret and his treasure, Guides to later conduct, clues to wisdom hidden, Truer than clocks or calendars as rules by which to measure.
Startling here a folded thought, an impulse uninvited, Streets away an engine screams, starting for the west, At the tremor nerves respond, as a bulb when lighted Suddenly reveals a room whose existence was unguessed.
By a parting, by a. journey, by adventure yet unknown Though already understood by a shadow cast ahead We discern in part, the pattern of the lives we lead alone Faithfill to designs bequeathed us by the dead. .
Eternity's blue flesh seen through a cloud in tatters, Voices in a villa garden, and an open door,
For a moment seem familiar, then the vision scatters, Memory seems to seize on something somehow known before.
And the future is the past in the head upon the pillow, The eye rests on a" landicape where the heart will throb, A hot:Se by a canal, a White wall, and a willow, Remembiring what hai riot happened . . . Do you hear a Sob ?
We bleed from others' .wounds ; for out own the styptic is not time, no healer for the heart that grieves, But resistance to surprise and acceptance of the cryptic : And now the night wind sighs abruptly in the leaves.
WILLLUI PLOMER.
Previous page
