When you open your mouths I see a well, and strangled chastity At the bottom--not chastity Of the flesh, but lucid purity Of the mind choked by a design Of filth that has slowly turned cold, Like a sewer intruding Upon a small, dead face. This is not repulsive. Only things alive, with gaudy hollows, Can repulse, but your death holds A haggard candour that gently thrusts its way Into the unimportance of facts. You are not old: you were never young. Life caressed your senses With a heavy sterility, And you thanked him with the remnant Of thought that he left behind-- His usual moment of absentminded kindness. When the muscles of your arm Punish the brush that rubs upon wood I see a rollicking mockery-- Rhythm in starved pursuit Of petrified desire. When the palms of your hands Stay flat in dirty water I can observe your emotions Welcome refuse as perfume, Intent upon a last ghastly deception. When you grunt and touch your hair I perceive your exhaustion Reaching for a bit of pity And carefully rearranging it. Lift up your pails and go home; Take the false tenderness of rest; Drop your clothes, disordered, on the floor. Vindictive simplicity. MEDITATIONS IN A CEMETERY You can write nothing new about death GEROID LATOUR Death, Grandiosely hackneyed subject, I live in a house one hundred years old Placed in the middle of a cemetery. The cemetery is bothered by mausoleums Where fragments of Greek and Gothic Lie in orderly shame. Slabs and crosses of stone Remain unacquainted with the bones That they must strive to introduce. The trees retain their guiltless sibilants. The trees tell me upon my morning walk: “In other cemeteries, Shakespeare, Maeterlinck and Shaw Fail to produce the slightest awe In trees that do not create for an audience.” Being finalities, the grass and trees Find no need for rules of etiquette. Delicacy must be effortless Or else it changes to a patched-up dress. But delicate and coarse are words For quickness that tries to linger, And slowness that strives to be fast! Emotions and thoughts are merely The improvisations of motion, And lack a permanent content. An aging tree is wiser Than an aging poet, And death is wiser than both. The scale ascends out of sight And I recall that the morning is light And smaller notes await me. The tomb-stones around my path Have been crisply visited by names To which they bear no relation. Imagine the perturbation Of a stone removed From the comprehension of a mountain And branded with the name of A. Rozinsky! Recollecting journeys of my own, I close my eyes and leave the stone. The names of other men entreat-- Slight variations in line Ponderously refusing to resign. Men who will be forgotten Try to hinder the process with stone.