("Lifted to my eyes...")

Henry W. Rago

NOVEMBER 1969

      HENRY RAGO

    FOUR FRAGMENTS

Lifted to my eyes, at that crest
Where nothing I had seen
Would again be seen,
Nothing be kept
Of all my keeping,
The still country, breathing
A stillness, the mountains
Shapes of silence, the brushed
Long lines-clay-blue, clay-
Violet, dull
Green-gold-combed through
The air's blue, swept to be
The curved
Edge of the planet!
It was
A wholeness lifted, where
My eyes lifted.

POBTRY

                       SOME LETTERS ABOUT À BOOK

                    We all saw it, then.
                    The eight or ten
                    Or twenty of us
                    That a darkness could be entered,
                    Lived in
                    And of that unknowing
                    There could be
                    No knowing of one's own
                    But another knowing
                    Others might know.

                    That where there was no light,
                    Light would become.

                                  HENRY RAGO

Haven: the time done
And the face clean
Through the long way, through
The long years, one
Bending above me, hair
Dark-gold in the dim light
Sea-grey eyes, the same
Hardly credible
Incredibly the same,
We are here, we have been here
A long time, but now
To say Here, touching the word,
Touching, folding our hands
Thus: here
Is haven

You,
Fair presence,
Whose name I cannot ever say-
Only Dear, Dearest, only
My heart-
Nameless for being
No part of me
But all that there is
Where there is no part
Or parting;
Whose name I cannot say
Because it is my deepest breath:
You, how long ago,
Witnessed this
New country.