Lyrics

If we meet each other in Hell it's not Hell. — Geoffrey Hill I How is it I can never find Or call to mind One image of Christ walking slowly in the rain, In a steady, gentle rain, The kind that shapes an afterimage Just for a moment of the man Like a cloak of shadow following Or like a blank page After it's been turned? The dead are concealed from us But not distorted by the rain. They remember our having remembered. A woman curls up on the sofa. Years before the fact she sleeps Her death and drapes it Even now, exactly as she must. Just after dawn, In the wren's eye There are no blossoms left in the trees, And yet the sunlight blazons white New flowers onto every leaf. The wren's eye gorges itself, Bursting the new life. The memory of a tree is the tree. Christ could fly. Impale upon him certain words Good as Greek For the impulse of the earth is to seek A language of flowers That do not die, turning A hair's breadth toward us Even now, exactly as they must. If it was justice I saw Fall from the sun Onto boys ruining the one Flower shared between them, So be it. The woman on the sofa wears a little wing In her sleep. When she awakes, Its twin will be the wren in the dream Nearly there, nearly all the way There into the human day. Rain falls out of brilliant sunshine. For a moment, her window Fills with catastrophe, boys Torn apart and scattered, white petals Blackening the glass, Exacting recent justice. So strange that the recent past, As chaste As antiquity, as the orangery Of a blind eye, should at once appear Preposterous Yet achingly tender. Modern times are too cautious. The boyish, florid love of catastrophe Has thrust a fist into the dawn, And the scent of that fist, Whose citron betters daylight, Is wasted on modern times. Not long ago, you and I Nearly captured a wren. Christ lifted His face then, And rain fell all day until evening. II In a corner of my garden, there is a spider's web Entirely armored in rose petals broken off by rain. The spider will learn to eat roses, or he will starve to death. This is political economy for modern times. The planet dies. The planet starves its cruel interiors First, with a blazon of colors and soft poetry. Next, It apportions one small bird to every tree and sets fire To the trees. The rest is the cold business of the oceans Who have never forgiven us for breathing air. Homer was tempted. Loose thighs of oblivion Welcomed humanity away from itself and from life, And only one of the Bronze-Age host refused that welcome. He was the father of starvation, entirely armored In the disguise of a real man, destroyer of oceans. We have made ugly war upon distinctions. Canon bleeds a wedding into the gigue, and "when I try to imagine a faultless love or" the seedtime Of my deepest convictions — that the soul is immortal, That a woman couched upon a fragile little wing Created the creator of the universe — thought, Or rather the entire machinery of truth and terror Usurps a newborn king, i.e. imagination. Phaedrus, step down. There is a little wing wearing sunshine Like wind in the white hair of the bee you never imagined. An infinitesimal distance goes on forever. At the moment of death, the light hand of Attic stele Softly lights upon the shoulder of eternity, And thought yields to flesh and flesh yields to imagination, Sexing this or that unimaginable creation With new hair. It makes a difference. We are bound to one another And to God by harrowing, albeit helpless distinctions, Impossible to bridge, imperative to love well. We are free, but briefly. The pattern of a leaf branches Out from human hearts, and the blood spills Into the pattern a stone makes crashing into windshields. God follows. The wrist and wing of the beloved follow Close behind, and not even Hell prevails against This new extinction. Slow time is the beginning Of no time at all. The light hand of Attic stele Wrests me from the sleep I'd imagined life to be — The walking stone, the irreparable Gethsemane — And I am awake, wearing a green flesh newly fashioned From my heart. CODA Should the bird outlast the blossom in the tree? Keep faith, but keep it silently, Starveling. I keenly remember there were two of us, And a stand of poplars like a kiss Quavering Upon the shade of the earth where no earth was Ready to bear the weight of us Relinquishing Soul for substance, pistil of white campion For color, continuance and one Unbelieving Substance of perfect memory. There were no trees. The sun was shining.