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The End of Regret
I
Regret, slow vacuum,
Siphoning the blood,
Seals up the running fever,
Kills, cures it with the dead.
The dead quiet the house,
Hollow the living eye,
Whose clearest hope is blind
To wake a leaf or star.
Enormous inward space
Of memory makes a room
For nothing but the lost
Light-seed that sprang the sun.
u
Sudden the dawn that once
Walked with the air of beauty,
That swayed like a pure tree,
Poisoning the tongue, the eye.
O no! it was the tongue
That poisoned the clear root;
The eye, insect of dark,
Riddled the leaves of light.
Tt was the end of flesh
But before flesh had time:
The sheet-metal of fire,
The covering cherubim,
Came down like lightning-strokes,
Draining the marrow's sap,
Aging the brook's mirror,
Bleeding the eye of sleep.
Yet, yet the ghost goes back
To wrest the burning sword,
And with no eye, no tongue,
Cries out the senseless word,
Transfleshed in paradise
To witness, rapt in air,
The still perfected world
Poised on the lightest flower.
u
Then have you but begun
Or have you ceased to live?
The leeching nail that wakes
Forever lets your love.