Horae Canonicae: Nones

What we know to be not possible, Though time after time foretold By wild hermits, by shaman and sybil Gibbering in their trances, Or revealed to a child in some chance rhyme Like will and kill, comes to pass Before we realize it: we are surprised At the ease and speed of our deed And uneasy: It is barely three, Mid-afternoon, yet the blood Of our sacrifice is already Dry on the grass; we are not prepared For silence so sudden and so soon; The day is too hot, too bright, too still, Too ever, the dead remains too nothing. What shall we do till nightfall? The wind has dropped and we have lost our public. The faceless many who always Collect when any world is to be wrecked, Blown up, burnt down, cracked open, Felled, sawn in two, hacked through, torn apart, Have all melted away: not one Of these who in the shade of walls and trees Lie sprawled now, calmly sleeping, Harmless as sheep, can remember why He shouted or what about So loudly in the sunshine this morning; All if challenged would reply -'It was a monster with one red eye, A crowd that saw him die, not I.- The hangman has gone to wash, the soldiers to eat; We are left alone with our feat. The Madonna with the green woodpecker, The Madonna of the fig-tree, The Madonna beside the yellow dam, Turn their kind faces from us And our projects under construction, Look only in one direction, Fix their gaze on our completed work: Pile-driver, concrete-mixer, Crane and pick-axe wait to be used again, But how can we repeat this? Outliving our act, we stand where we are, As disregarded as some Discarded artifact of our own, Like torn gloves, rusted kettles, Abandoned branch-lines, worn lop-sided Grindstones buried in nettles. This mutilated flesh, our victim, Explains too nakedly, too well, The spell of the asparagus garden, The aim of our chalk-pit game; stamps, Birds' eggs are not the same, behind the wonder Of tow-paths and sunken lanes, Behind the rapture on the spiral stair, We shall always now be aware Of the deed into which they lead, under The mock chase and mock capture, The racing and tussling and splashing, The panting and the laughter, Be listening for the cry and stillness To follow after: wherever The sun shines, brooks run, books are written, There will also be this death. Soon cool tramontana will stir the leaves, The shops will re-open at four, The empty blue bus in the empty pink square Fill up and depart: we have time To misrepresent, excuse, deny, Mythify, use this event While, under a hotel bed, in prison, Down wrong turnings, its meaning Waits for our lives: sooner than we would choose Bread will melt, water will burn, And the great quell begin, Abaddon Set up his triple gallows At our seven gates, fat Belial make Our wives waltz naked; meanwhile It would be best to go home, if we have a home, In any case good to rest. That our dreaming wills may seem to escape This dead calm, wander instead On knife edges, on black and white squares, Across moss, baize, velvet, boards, Over cracks and hillocks, in mazes Of string and penitent cones, Down granite ramps and damp passages, Through gates that will not relatch And doors marked Private, pursued by Moors And watched by latent robbers, To hostile villages at the heads of fjords, To dark chateaux where wind sobs In the pine-trees and telephones ring, Inviting trouble, to a room, Lit by one weak bulb, where our Double sits Writing and does not look up. That, while we are thus away, our own wronged flesh May work undisturbed, restoring The order we try to destroy, the rhythm We spoil out of spite: valves close And open exactly, glands secrete, Vessels contract and expand At the right moment, essential fluids Flow to renew exhausted cells, Not knowing quite what has happened, but awed By death like all the creatures Now watching this spot, like the hawk looking down Without blinking, the smug hens Passing close by in their pecking order, The bug whose view is balked by grass. Or the deer who shyly from afar Peer through chinks in the forest.