Scared Parson

Who's that so threadbare, queer, and stooping,

In the old burying-ground ? -

Who loiters, studiously snooping,

Beside each sunken mound?

It is the Reverend Ephraim Toomey,

Who, muttering, hesitates

Beneath the willows, huge and gloomy,

And he is reading dates.

He kneels, close to each gravestone peering,

As if it were a face,

His head on one side, as if hearing

Faint voices in this place.

And, in a notebook, small and spotted

From being laid on earth,

The spans of life are neatly jotted,

The times of death and birth.

The carved scroll with its discourse cracking,

The gritty fluted urn,

The stone hand with two fingers lacking,

Are not his great concern;

Nor names, nor virtues someone wrote of:

In a precise sour verse.

It is the year that he makes note of,

The day, exact and terse.

Not of man's soul, taut and extended

From star to star to star...

But of man's flesh, begun and ended,

He keeps a calendar.

Eternity's a range too roomy -

Brains burst that ponder it.

And so the Reverend Ephraim Toomey

Collects Time, bit by bit.