Old stone to new building, old timber to new fires,
Old fires to ashes, and ashes to the earth
Which is already flesh, fur and faeces,
Bone of man and beast, cornstalk and leaf.

To tame chaos
To drink its milk
To taste its honey
To claim its potent power

Convivio

       I.    Time

In my beginning is my end. In succession
Houses rise and fall, crumble, are extended,
Are removed, destroyed, restored, or in their place
Is an open field, or a factory, or a by-pass.

Time depends on place
In space
Speed direction and perception
Time is one tool

Sudden in a shaft of sunlight
Even while the dust moves
There rises the hidden laughter
Of children in the foliage
Quick now, here, now, always-
Ridiculous the waste sad time
Stretching before and after.

Can I recognize
Patterns repeated
Are they received
Or do I stand weeping
On the empty edge
Unable to escape reasonable expectations
μη μου απτου

Love is itself unmoving,
Only the cause and end of movement,
Timeless, and undesiring
Except in the aspect of time
Caught in the form of limitation
Between un-being and being.

Fragrance of lilac riding the breeze
Perennial predictable a repeating pattern
Celestial and ecliptic intersect
Approaching the vernal what do I
See hear smell taste feel, what evidence
Confirms this cosmic movement

The detail of the pattern is movement,
As in the figure of the ten stairs.
Desire itself is movement
Not in itself desirable;

Three days hence bursts the redbud
As bees and butterflies drink of periwinkle
Creamy white dogwoods glistening
In the light dappled wood

Will not stay still. Shrieking voices
Scolding, mocking, or merely chattering,
Always assail them. The Word in the desert
Is most attacked by voices of temptation,
The crying shadow in the funeral dance,
The loud lament of the disconsolate chimera.

Three days ago the peach tree
Was a skeleton of bare branches
Bark bumpy with woody welts
Today pink blossoms
Emerge as tiny brush tips
Ready to render unexpected beauty

And all is always now. Words strain,
Crack and sometimes break, under the burden,
Under the tension, slip, slide, perish,

Everyday expectations
That make or more often subrogate
Life’s meaning

Or say that the end precedes the beginning,
And the end and the beginning were always there
Before the beginning and after the end.

Each of us claiming this day
Undertaking transactions
Deliberations complications and

The stillness, as a Chinese jar still
Moves perpetually in its stillness.
Not the stillness of the violin, while the note lasts,
Not that only, but the co-existence,

The planet still turns
Laughter greeting the sunrise
Strong coffee stirring our senses
Children leaving for school

     V

Words move, music moves
Only in time; but that which is only living
Can only die. Words, after speech, reach
Into the silence. Only by the form, the pattern,
Can words or music reach

There was turmoil torture death
And the sun rose
Turmoil is long fermenting
Torture a tool of state
Death friendly as ever

Down on us? After the kingfisher's wing
Has answered light to light, and is silent, the light is still
At the still point of the turning world.

If meaning implodes to less than its radius
Can we still claim it as meaningful
"At the still point of the turning world."

Stray down, bend to us; tendril and spray
Clutch and cling?
Chill
Fingers of yew be curled

Can its radius be calculated
What is its density
rs
Is meaning constant

       IV

Time and the bell have buried the day,
the black cloud carries the sun away.
Will the sunflower turn to us, will the clematis

Meaning is made in time and space
Meaning clearly has energy
Does it have mass

This is the one way, and the other
Is the same, not in movement
But abstention from movement; while the world moves
In appetency, on its metalled ways
Of time past and time future.

Leaning toward you
I fall farther from you
Or is it deeper into
A place where time and
Space sweep swirl and whorl

Dessication of the world of sense,
Evacuation of the world of fancy, 
Inoperancy of the world of spirit; 

That any externality
Will discern a singularity
Requiem sempiternam

Descend lower, descend only
Into the world of perpetual solitude,
World not world, but that which is not world,
Internal darkness, deprivation
And destitution of all property,

Where all that is was can be
Again becomes as one
As at a certain intensity
Energy and matter
Collapse into such density

Eructation of unhealthy souls
Into the faded air, the torpid
Driven on the wind that sweeps the gloomy hills of London,
Hampstead and Clerkenwell, Campden and Putney,
Highgate, Primrose and Ludgate. Not here
Not here the darkness, in this twittering world.

Between sea and sky
One second before sunrise
Or moonrise at twilight
And certainly not that
Horizon of deep darkness
Where time stands still

Tumid apathy with no concentration
Men and bits of paper, whirled by the cold wind
That blows before and after time,
Wind in and out of unwholesome lungs
Time before and time after.

Trembling through sand
Feeling waves and wind
But not hearing or seeing
Not quite conceiving
The sliver of silver

Neither plentitude nor vacancy. Only a flicker
Over the strained time-ridden faces
Distracted from distraction by distraction
Filled with fancies and empty of meaning

Salt on the tongue
Toes in the tide
Scent of sea grass
Irregular rhythms

With slow rotation suggesting permanence
Nor darkness to purify the soul
Emptying the sensual with deprivation
Cleansing affection from the temporal.

Leaving us deaf
And mostly blind
On the verge of
Reality’s ocean

III

Here is a place of disaffection
Time before and time after
In a dim light: neither daylight
Investing form with lucid stillness
Turning shadow into transient beauty

White reflects
Black absorbs
Light persists
But we do not perceive
Highest or lowest lambda

The moment in the arbour where the rain beat,
The moment in the draughty church at smokefall
Be remembered; involved with past and future.
Only through time time is conquered.

Between then and now when we were not with each other how
Did our beings bend: symmetrically commensurately was there rough parity
Or do you merely continue in the same way before now and forever
My fullest self failing to affect even the slightest oblique?

Allow but a little consciousness.
To be conscious is not to be in time
But only in time can the moment in the rose-garden,

My being is in relationship with you now then perhaps again
Here and now I am as I am in part as you engage me even make me
Is your being likewise shaped by my becoming shifting in my wake

Yet the enchainment of past and future
Woven in the weakness of the changing body,
Protects mankind from heaven and damnation
Which flesh cannot endure.
                                                                Time past and time future

Where mere inches from their opposite warmth and wealth abound
Where with hot tea and amber whisky we remember
A hot humid summer when our disagreements bound us
Found us returning to argue finally to listen even occasionally hear
                                                                Patterns received and repeated

By a grace of sense, a white light still and moving,
Erhebung without motion, concentration
Without elimination, both a new world
And the old made explicit, understood
In the completion of its partial ecstasy,
The resolution of its partial horror.

“… not from the world of truthfulness but from the babble of literary gossip –
there is no truth in it at all.”
But they rejected his clarification preferring citation to creation.
It begins to snow: a fine dust swift becoming a white wet whirling shower
We lean into the squall shouting some but finally silenced by the storm
Until soaked and nearly numb you lead me into the Four Seasons

I can only say, there we have been: but I cannot say where.
And I cannot say, how long, for that is to place it in time.
The inner freedom from the practical desire,
The release from action and suffering, release from the inner
And the outer compulsion, yet surrounded

Affirms their current contention oblivious to an alternate proposition
And while permutation is welcome perverse confiscation is not.
Did you read Philip Roth’s open letter to Wikipedia I ask
(You were out of town) He wanted to correct an entry claiming
For a story he had authored a context which he explained, emerged

Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor towards,
Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point,
There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.

Happily expanding on how and why gently you bring us back to me
Asking how it is I see and can say what others do not
For regardless of your form or function most find whatever

At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless;
Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is,
But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity,

Shifting the subject to your art I say what I see
                           Exactly
                           You agree

In light upon the figured leaf
And hear upon the sodden floor
Below, the boarhound and the boar
Pursue their pattern as before
But reconciled among the stars.

Our talk as empty as the tree
Though there is I suppose opportunity
You ask about me but I am not
Ready to say may not even know
Where I am today

The dance along the artery
The circulation of the lymph
Are figured in the drift of stars
Ascend to summer in the tree
We move above the moving tree

Of an abundant season shared
Not so long ago.
You are troubled I am tired
It is bone-chilling cold
Daffodils bend in obeisance