There sat down, once, a thing on Henry’s heart
So heavy, if he had a hundred years
& more, & weeping, sleepless, in all them time
Henry could not make good.
Starts again always in Henry’s ears
The little cough somewhere, an odor, a chime.
And there is another thing he has in mind
Like a grave Sienese face a thousand years
Would fail to blur the still profiled reproach of. Ghastly,
With open eyes, he attends, blind.
All the bells say: too late. This is not for tears;
Thinking.
But never did Henry, as he thought he did,
End anyone and hacks her body up
And hide the pieces, where they may be found.
He knows: he went over everyone, & nobody’s missing.
Often he reckons, in the dawn, them up.
Nobody is ever missing.
He lay in the middle of the world, and twitcht.
More Sparine for Pelides,
Human (half) & down here as he is, with probably insulting mail to open
And certainly unworthy words to hear
And his unforgivable memory.
—I seldom go to films. They are too exciting,
Said the Honourable Possum.
—It takes me so long to read the ‘paper,
Said to me one day a novelist hot as a firecracker,
Because I have to identify myself with everyone in it,
Including the corpses, pal.
Kierkegaard wanted a society, to refuse to read ‘papers,
And that was not, friends, his worst idea.
Tiny Hardy, toward the end, refused to say anything,
A programme adopted early on by long Housman,
And Gottfried Benn
Said:—We are using our own skins for wallpaper and we cannot win.
You couldn’t bear to grow old, but we grow old.
Our differences accumulate. Our skin
Tightens or droops: it alters.
Take courage, things are not what they have been
And they will never again. Hot hearts grow cold,
The rush to the surface falters,
Secretive grows the disappearing soul
Learned & uncertain, young again
But not in the same way:
Heraclitus had a wise word here to say,
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The Dream Songs part 2
