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