Calenture

This house has frontiers where stand guard

The sentinels of conscience. No matter

What catastrophe or war occurred

It would not break their lines nor shatter

Those outposts where pity keeps his watch

Over loneliness marsh and custom reappears

As a sea's ghost no real sea could match:

Nor memory's maze where lurk the bitter years,

Wrenched out of Time, awaiting their revenge;

Nor, worst of all, would darken scandal pass

Where wind blows words from every blade of grass

Yet trees stand quieter than Stonehenge.

But I will make that midnight journey:

Past those white islands where the northern bear

Disdains the incontinent green sea;

Past pride's last paradise where first despair

Floats dangerously south; past pole and pole

Towards the centre where the dogstar lust,

Which set in motion the immoderate whole

Out of the sexless elements of dust,

Rages like Mars among the half-insane:

Westward in Folly's ship towards those grounds

Where trenches gape like unattended wounds

And fields stink of the enormous slain.

Eastward to some high tableland where you

With countless benedictions bless that boy

Who in a madman's frenzy across oceans flew

With compass trembling between death and joy:

Who saw the ordered multitude collapse

Before its intricate and sightless god

And fled your arms towards a great eclipse

Beneath whose darkness panic rode roughshod.

But I, who made no promise to return,

At dawn made captive, crept within these walls

To love or lethargy till doomsday falls

Or chaos comes and order may adjourn.