On Christmas Eve

What is the thing I would say to you
Ere the time when we can say nothing at all,
Neither you to me nor I to you,

And between us is sprung a smoky wall?
If I am left, I shall push the mist
And crack my eyes to a gimlet point

Striving to pierce its every twist

And bore a hole through some weakened joint.
But I know very well it will disappoint

My keenest urge, and I shall be left

Baffled, forsaken, and blind to boot,

But with still the feeling that in some cleft
You linger and watch and maybe hear

The dim and feeble substitute

For speech which may travel from sphere to sphere
And hold itself perpetual

Merging the there and here.

I am counted one who is good at words,
And yet, in placing my thought of you
Where I can see it, hard and clear,
This, that, and the other, in review,

I think that only the songs of birds

Are adequate for the task which I

Can never even make the attempt

To come at ever so haltingly.

I earn my own contempt

That I should presume to try.

You have lifted my eyes, and made me whole,
And given me purpose, and held me faced
Toward the horizon you once had placed

As my aim's grand measure. Your starry truth
Has shown me the worm-holes in Earth's apple,
You have soothed me when I dared not look,

And forced me on to seek and grapple
With the nightmare doubts which block the ways
Of a matrix-breaking, visioning soul
When, lacking the arrogance of youth,
I started to carve the granite days
Into tablets of a book.

The hundred kindly daily things,

I have numbered them all though I may not speak them.

Sitting here on this Christmas Eve,
I think of you asleep above,
And the house has a gentleness which clings,
And a wide content of love.
What you have said and what you have done,

I should not have known enough to seek them,
But now the very rooms you leave
Have a peace which hangs like a hyacinth scent
All about them.

Your ways, your thoughts,
I would surely rather lose the sun
Than be without them.

So absolutely is it I am bent

To know how you are excellent.

Dearest, I have written it down

For your Christmas Day, but not half is said.
I might write so long it would span the town
And yet scarce mention more than a shred
Of you and you, and you and me;

And of all that I know so well to be,

How wretchedly I have scratched the stone!

You must know the end instead.