Ether

Goodbye, dear Earth} this shining whiteness and these

Points of light on steel are strange to be the last

That I shall see of you, my many-colored, myriad-formed

Polyphonetic, cruel!

It is true that all men long to die.

To escape from loving and from love.

I am not different.

"You can breath this in as easily as air."

I breathe. I breathe. I shout,

"Death! Hear me-stop my painful breath!

Do you hear me?"

Just barely-in this whirling of the room

Walls circling faster faster

Now the city whirls, the state, the continent.

Now man streams out from the careening sphere;

Floats laterally beyond his element,

It being only an idea of man's that his

Peculiar star is high in space and he

Importantly weighted in his ambient air.

The viscous oceans splash off the earth

Like garden sprays and continents like dust

From a barrow wheel where he floats laterally

Out, out into the universe and slows,

And I among the moats in sun leaning, reached for a human hand.

What hand I know, but it eluded me even

As in the vertical. Tentatively, as then

It reached for mine. But time was gone,

Our element was gone, all but our grief was gone.

My fingers touched only a polished smile,

A thumb nail as we passed in stratosphere,

Conscious of our severance

Stranger than our circumstance, more terrifying.

Our tears mingled with spume that was

The Amazon. Then I was caught on a mountain

Of a moon that was not earth's and at its

Summit saw the conquerors, Hannibal,

Caesar, Napoleon, many more standing in snow.

At their feet their power of fire and noise,

Destruction in dumb show without authority,

Bright flames that lapped and did not drink

And screaming silences. Below them moving

Slowly the glacier of the dead-in-war.

But these massed corpses were not the real dead

But such images of death as visited

'Women when the death news came.

The stony faces of the conquerors turned always east,

But their eyes compelled on ropes of light

Followed the glacier's endless southward flow.

I drank at the glacier's rim a cup

Of bitter blood from these dear dead

As those must do who have hated wars.

Then that moon turning rolled me out again in space

Where I saw comets flower in firework showers,

And worlds with wheels and rims and rings

Run toward their suns and roll invisible in light.

Moons met and kissed,

And star past star circling made

Metal music in far firmaments.

Then space came on a space of quietude,

A still plateau.

Minorities in multitudes met there

With angels, and their concord was man's

Spirit-hunger and angelic biologic deprivations.

They talked as patients in a doctor's waiting-room,

Having had the same disease but different

Symptomatic suffering. A sun moved east

Deliberately to shine on them. In language

Known to childhood and to love they praised him.

I, moving laterally among the motes, perceived

That poets and a scientist or two had learned

To use vertical gyrations in space and moved

At will among the dusts and spumes,

And breathed in space as easily as air.

But that which they exhaled was not space

But love made palpable, which floating

Scarflike hid the Eye of Fear.

I too tried to lift my head and shoulders and to

Fill my lungs with space but struggled for

That breath, and pain rose in me like a symphony,

Pulsed and beat and trumpeted and knocked me down,

And I looked up to see space close

Flatly over me and make a ceiling. Four walls

Fell about my bed, air rushed into my lungs

Like fire, and the familiar dystol was my law again.

I lay still, moveless under my falling tears,

For then I knew I had not merited my death.