If it were not for England, who would bear This heavy servitude one moment more? To keep a brothel, sweep and wash the floor Of filthiest hovels were noble to compare With this brass-cleaning life. Now here, now there Harried in foolishness, scanned curiously o'er By fools made brazen by conceit, and store Of antique witticisms thin and bare.
Only the love of comrades sweetens all, Whose laughing spirit will not be outdone. As night-watching men wait for the sun To hearten them, so wait I on such boys As neither brass nor Hell-fire may appal, Nor guns, nor sergeant-major's bluster and noise.
All these years I overlooked them in the racket of the rest, this symbiotic splash of plant and fungus feeding on rock, on sun, a little moisture, air — tiny acid-factories dissolving salt from living rocks and eating them.
Chop, hack, slash; chop, hack, slash; cleaver, boning knife, ax— not even the clumsiest clod of a butcher could do this so crudely, time, as do you, dismember me, render me, leave me slop in a pail, one part of my body a hundred years old, one not even there anymore, another still riven with idiot vigor, voracious as the youth I was for whom everything always was going too slowly, too slowly.
It was me then who chopped, slashed, through you, across you, relished you, gorged on you, slugged your invisible liquor down raw. Now you're polluted; pulse, clock, calendar taint you, befoul you, you suck at me, pull at me, barbed wire knots of memory tear me, my heart hangs, inert, a tag-end of tissue, firing, misfiring, trying to heave itself back to its other way with you.
But was there ever really any other way with you? When I ran
Cold nights outside the taverns in Wyoming pickups and big semis lounge idling, letting their haunches twitch now and then in gusts of powder snow, their owners inside for hours, forgetting as well as they can the miles, the circling plains, the still town that connects to nothing but cold and space and a few stray ribbons of pavement, icy guides to nothing but bigger towns and other taverns that glitter and wait:
There's a place I know where the birds swing low, And wayward vines go roaming, Where the lilacs nod, and a marble god Is pale, in scented gloaming. And at sunset there comes a lady fair Whose eyes are deep with yearning. By an old, old gate does the lady wait Her own true love's returning.
But the days go by, and the lilacs die, And trembling birds seek cover; Yet the lady stands, with her long white hands Held out to greet her lover. And it's there she'll stay till the shadowy day A monument they grave her.
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