The Last Night

The worst thing about death must be
the first night.

—Juan Ramón Jiménez

Before I opened you, Jiménez,
it never occurred to me that day and night
would continue to circle each other in the ring of death,

but now you have me wondering
if there will also be a sun and a moon
and will the dead gather to watch them rise and set

then repair, each soul alone,
to some ghastly equivalent of a bed.
Or will the first night be the only night,

a darkness for which we have no other name?
How feeble our vocabulary in the face of death,
How impossible to write it down.

This is where language will stop,
the horse we have ridden all our lives
rearing up at the edge of a dizzying cliff.

The word that was in the beginning
and the word that was made flesh—
those and all the other words will cease.

Even now, reading you on this trellised porch,
how can I describe a sun that will shine after death?
But it is enough to frighten me

into paying more attention to the world’s day-moon,
to sunlight bright on water
or fragmented in a grove of trees,

and to look more closely here at these small leaves,
these sentinel thorns,

whose employment it is to guard the rose.

Carmel Point

The extraordinary patience of things!

The beautiful place defaced with a crop of suburban houses -

How beautiful when we first beheld it,

Unbroken field of poppy and lupin walled with clean cliffs;

No intrusion but two or three horses pasturing,

Or a few milch cows rubbing their flanks on the outcrop rockheads -

Now the spoiler has come; does it care?

Not faintly. It has all time. It knows the people are a tide

That swells and in time will ebb, and all

Their works will dissolve. Meanwhile the image of pristine beauty

Lives at the very grain of the granite,

Safe as the endless ocean that climbs our cliff. - As for us:

We must uncenter our minds from ourselves;

We must unhumanise our views a little, and become confident

As the rock and ocean that we were made from.

The Winter Palace

Most people know more as they get older:

I give all that the cold shoulder.

I spent my second quarter-century

Losing what I had learnt at university

And refusing to take in what had happened since.

Now I know none of the names in the public prints,

And am starting to give offence by forgetting faces

And swearing I've never been in certain places.

It will be worth it, if in the end I manage

To blank out whatever it is that is doing the damage.

Then there will be nothing I know.
My mind will fold in to itself, like fields, like snow.