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The Repeating Heart
All first love lives as long as love shall last. All loves fall into loves, lead up to loves, And each new solitary lover proves A face behind the false face of the past. First love, who laughs at mirrors, laughs at me, Who tell the lovers of my rosary As deftly as some old ecclesiast. First love dies down to visions in the street; A turn of the head, a gesture, anywhere, Is all desertion needs; we turn and stare After maskers, and the heart forgets a beat, The heart surrenders to a second chance In arenas where only the shadows dance, Where gods put down their thumbs at each defeat. You, the first who came, not knowing you Had come, who made the world swirl out of sight And opened your windows-only to the night, Who went, not knowing you had gone, and who Like a ballad monger left my life displayed, You will not know what it is to be afraid, Will not hear me, nor know that what I say is true. Ghost, do you walk again tonight? Yet why Ask if you walk, when you are not here to say; You sleep a thousand hours and miles away. You were not one to wake with love, yet I Think you walk in darkness, for my heart Rising through doldrums sees your counterpart In each somnambulist that passes by. A night of talk, a death, rice or confetti, A sigh from nowhere, walking under stars, A sitter or a waiter in the bars: These bring me you and sorrow and self-pity, And when the sundown sky reveals old scores, An old man writes his memoirs on the shores Of the river of a continental city. The bird that sang when the chimera loomed In the park, the sweet and incidental flower Leaning from windows of the office tower On tenements where others are entombed: These bring you part of me. But the limbs and trunk Are left to spar with phantoms, reel dead-drunk Down alleys of a city that is doomed. Before the glass the dark hand goes to the face. ; What left this glass this mask for fields of sun Cut off by time? Behind the mask no one, No more a face. Behind the face no trace, No more a mask. Suns through windows pour On dustbins, empty crates, excelsior; The house is haunted only by the space. You were the first, the others came to pass. The hand never lost its skill; though each black night Of vows seemed the first to see the morning light, All was second or seventh hand, and the dark high mass Revealed you the always lonely vision: lips Terraced, eyes of glass, arms hoops, And the sighs were the breath of life you brought to pass. God rest you. You will be saved outside of prayers; You comb your hair, remember the cure for weeping, The day is the desk, the party, to bed for sleeping, And when, one coming to seize us unawares, I tumble for love, embrace the sexless sod, Bells toll, mares scream, graves groan, hell gapes, God- You incidentally will gently have fallen downstairs.