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Then we poised, in time's fullness brought
As to a new country, the senses
In the mutations of a sallow light,
A season of signs and speechless;
Thought momently on nothing, knew
No oratory, no welcome:
Silence about our silence grew;
Beached by the convenient stream.
Night is familiar when it comes.
On dim gestures does the mind
Exorcise abandoned limbs,
Disbodied of that other land
Estranged almost beyond response,
A bleached and faintly relevant
Signature to stir the sense
In veteran usage and intent.
One dreams fixed beasts that drowse or wonder,
Not blinking; by the stream a few
Poplars and white beeches where
Exhausted leaves, suspended, through
The distant autumn do not fall,
Or, fallen, fired, are unconsumed,
The flame perduring, the still
Smoke eternal in the mind.
(Embarrassed, these scarred Penates
Smile, between raw stones supported,
Musing perhaps an anomalous
Speech no longer understood.)
We ponder, after damp sundown,
The slow boats, departing, heavy,
In another time; our direction
Moved in the cool rain away:
We with brief knowledge hazarded
Alien influence and tropic,
Entered and did diversely thread
What degradations, false music,
Straits whose rocks lean to the sound,
Monstrous, of their declivities,
As lovers on their private ground
See no distance, but face and face;
We have passed in a warm light
Islands whose charmed habitants
Doze on the shore to dissipate
The seasons of their indolence;
Even against those borders led
Lapped by the forgetful rivers
Have stood among the actual dead,
No breath moving the gray flowers.
The remnant of all passage lies
Cold or distorted in the brain
As tall fables of strangers, as
Lisped visions of other men.
(The neighbor waters flame and wave:
All that we could not bring away
Our hands, as though with courage, have
Burned, and the tired ships where they lay.)
The covenant we could but seize
Fractionally by the ear
And dreamed it substance, that the eyes
Might follow--and its motions were
Hands that toy about a door
In dreams and melt where they caress,
Not displacing the wind they wear--
Brought us to this final place.
We see the various brain enclosed
Never the promise, but its guise:
Terrain in private we supposed
That always in its Easter is.
Rather, in priestly winter bide
Our shadows where no prayers will work
That unison we faintly, toward
Our time and litany, invoke.
You, satisfied under no sky,
Even from this air you air is fled,
Your singular authority
Vain, no richness where you bled,
But you are dwindled and now die
To a vexed but promissory shape
For an old man stroked always by
The vague extremities of sleep:
So were he tangled to believe,
By euphory and the leaves' dictions.
His grave members did walk and weave,
Blessed, among the many mansions.
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