Not less light shall the gold and the green lie

On the cyclonic curl and diamonded eye, than

Love lay yesterday on the breast like a beast.

Not less light shall God tread my maze of nerve

Than that great dread of tomorrow drove over

My maze of days.

Not less terrible that tread

Stomping upon your grave than I shall tread there.

Who is a god to haunt the tomb but Love?

Therefore I shall be there at morning and midnight,

Not with a straw in my hair and a tear as Ophelia

Floating along my sorrow, but I shall come with

The cabala of things, the cipher of nature, so that

With the mere flounce of a bird's feather crest

I shall speak to you where you sit in all trees,

Where you conspire with all things that are dead.

Who is so far that Love cannot speak to him?

So that no corner can hide you, no autumn of leaves

So deeply close over you that I shall not find you,

To stretch down my hand and sting you with life

Like poison that resurrects. O remember

How once the Lyrae dazzled and how the Novembers

Smoked, so that blood burned, flashed its mica,

And that was life. Now if I dip my hand in your grave

Shall I find it bloody with autumn and bright with stars?

Who is to answer if you will not answer me?

But you are the not yet dead, so cannot answer.

Hung by a hair's breadth to the breath of a lung,

Nothing you know of the hole over which you hang

But that it's dark and deep as tomorrow midnight.

I ask, but you cannot answer except with words

Which show me the mere interior of your fear,

The reverse face of the world. But this,

This is not death, the standing on the head

So that a sky is seen. O who

Who but the not yet born can tell me of my bourne?

Lie you there, lie you there, my never, never,

Never to be delivered daughter, so wise in ways

Where you perch like a bird beyond the horizon,

Seeing but not being seen, above our being?

Then tell me, shall the meeting ever be,

When the corpse dives back through the womb

To clasp his child before it ever was?

Who but the dead can kiss the not yet born?

Sad is space between a start and a finish,

Like the rough roads of stars, fiery and mad.

I go between birth and the urn, a bright ash

Soon blazed to blank, like a fire-ball. But

Nothing I bring from the before, no message,

No clue, no key, no answer. I hear no echo,

Only the sheep's blood dripping from the gun,

The serpent's tear like fire along the branch.

O who will speak from a womb or a cloud?