One! Two! Three!

Poems,
Poems,
What are poems but words
Set edgewise up like children's blocks

To build a structure no one can inhabit.

I fling you words,
Raw and bleeding
Out of my desolation.
Tock! Tock! The clock is no more monotonous than I,
Beating your name to every new vibration:

Aching upon remembrance with a durability

Which wears a knife-edge all along each shouting nerve.

Day and night wind round upon my loneliness

Coiling me in a serpent strangle of time.

One morning opens like another:
Sun on each wet bush and tree;
They laugh and rustle,
But I shut my eyes.
How wide the sky is!
And all that way the sun must go

Before another day will have been ended.

Lamps, work, and sunrise,

And again -- again --

Always again, and each day tastes like powder
Brittle and salt.

And each night goes like water

Weeping along a heavy wall of stone.

And nothing comes.
It cannot come,
Since you are all that ever could have come.

I count them -- one, two, three, and ten's a bundle; the,
A tally of burnt sticks
A heap of twigs,
With not one little bell-flower nodding up between them.

So then I take my blocks

And neatly place them

One balancing another.

I mock that ghastly clock and make a cupola of windows
And out of each I gaze awhile
Looking down long roads for you.
Then I put in a paved forecourt-yard,
And lay my smoothest squares,
And plant wide borders of campanulas.

But what I plant is nothing;

What comes up

Is fire-weed.

How often have I seen it
Glaring above the silver-grey of rotted boards
Where a deserted farmhouse
Was falling gently,

Each year a little more of it would settle.

Tush! This is fooling.

Words,

Words,
I think I hate them.
You cannot live in them,
And so they are no more to me
Than spiders' webs:
Tall, floating, ghostly webs,
Hanging above the candles of a church

When someone's to be buried.

Therefore I will put my words away,
And count the ticking of the clock

As men count pins in solitary cells.

To-morrow it may rain
And then, at least,
I shall not have to watch the terribly slow spanning
Of the sun
Across that reach of sky.