A Matter of Life & Death

I did not see the iris move,

I did not feel the urfurling of my love.

This was the sequence of the flower:

First the leaf from which the bud would swell,

A green fardel

A rolled rainbow;

Then the sheath that enclosed the blow

Pale and close

Giving no hint of the blaze within,

A tender skin with violet vein.

Then the first unfurling petal

As if a hand that held a jewel

Curled back a finger, let the light wink

Narrowly through the chink,

Or like the rays before the sunrise

Promising glory.

And while my back is turned, the flower has blown.

Impossible to tell

How this opulent blossom from that spick bud has grown.

The chrysalis curled tight,

The flower poised for flight-

Corolla with lolling porphyry wings

And yellow tiger markings

A chasing-place for shade and light:

Between these two, the explosion

Soundless, with no duration.

(I did not see the iris move,

I did not feel my love unfurl. )

The most tremendous change takes place in silence,

Unseen, however you mark the sequence,

Unheard, whatever the din of exploding stars.

Down the porphyry stair

Headlong into the air

The boy has come: he crouches there

A tender startled creature

With a fawn's ears and hair-spring poise

Alert to every danger

Aghast at every noise.

A blue blink

From under squeezed-up lids

As mauve as iris buds

Is gone as quickly as a bird's bright wink.

Gone- but as if his soul had looked an instant through

the chink.

And perfect as his shell-like nails,

Close as are to the flower its petals,

My love unfolded with him.

Yet till this moment what was he to me?

Conjecture and analogy:

Conceived, and yet unknown.

Behind this narrow barrier of bone

Distant as any unknown land could be.

I have seen the light of day,

Was it sight or taste or smell?

What I have been, who can tell?

What I shall be, who can say?

He floats in life as a lily in the pool

Free and yet rooted;

And strong though seeming frail

Like the wraith fritillary

That trails its first-appearing bud

As though too weak to raise it from the mud

But is stronger than you dream

And later lifts the paper lantern

High upon an arched and sinewy stem.

His smiles are all largesse,

Need ask for no return,

Since give and take are meaningless

To one who gives by needing

And takes our love for granted

And grants a favour even by his greed.

The ballet of his twirling hands

His chirping and his loving sounds,

Perpetual expectation

Perpetual surprise-

Not a lifetime satisfies

For watching, everything he does

We wish him to do always.

Only in a lover's eyes

Shall I be so approved again;

Only the other side of pain

Can truth again be all I speak,

Or I again possess

A saint's hilarious carelessness.

He rows about his ocean

Of leaning cliffs and towers,

A horizontal being,

Straddled by walking people

By table-legs and chairs;

And sees the world as you can see

Upside-down in water

The wavering heights of trees

Whose roots hang from your eyes.

Then Time begins to trail

In vanishing smoke behind him,

A vertical creature now

With a pocket full of nails,

One of a gang of urchin boys

Who proves his sex by robber noise-

Roar of the sucking dove

And thunder of the wren.

Terror waits in the woods,

But in the sun he is brazen

Because our love is his

No matter what he does;

His very weakness claims a share

In the larger strength of others,

And perfect in our eyes

He is only vulnerable there.

But not immortal there, alas.

We cannot keep, and see. The shapes of clouds

Which alter as we gaze

Are not more transient than these living forms

Which we so long to hold

For ever in the moment's mould.

The figures frozen in the camera's record

And carried with us from the past.

Are like those objects buried with the dead-

Temporal treasures irrelevant to their need.

Yes, this is the worst,

The living truth is lost,

And is supplanted by these album smiles.

What you desire to keep, you slay:

While you watch me, I am going.

Wiser than you, I would not stay

Even if I could: my hope's in growing.

My form as a dapple of sun that flies

On the brook, is changed; my earliest word

Is the call you learnt to recognize

And now forget, of a strange bird.

Yet, as the calyx was hidden in the bud

So the bud is hidden in the flower

Though past in time:

The end is not more true than the beginning,

Nor is the promise cancelled by the prime.

Not only what he was, and is, but what he might have been

In each is rolled within.

Our life depends on that.

What other claim have we to resurrection?

For now that we can contemplate perfection

We have lost the knack of being it. What should be saved

Of these distorted lives?

All we can pray is

Save us from nothingness.

Nonentity, the universal dread,

Which makes us feel an irrational pity for the dead,

And fight the anodyne

Even while we long for deliverance from pain.

So, I have read,

When a man gave his darling in grief to the grave

About her neck in a locket tied

He set this urgent word-

Not to drink Lethe, at all costs not to forget.

And this is truth to us, even yet-

For if life is eternal

All must be held, though all must be redeemed.

But what can ever restore

To these sad and short-coming lives of ours

The lovely jocund creatures that we were

And did not know we were?

What can give us at once

The being and the sense?

Why, each within

Has kept his secret for some Resurrection:

The wonder that he was

And can be, which is his

Not by merit, only by grace.

It comes to light, as love is born with a child,

Neither with help nor herald-

I did not see the iris move-

Neither by sight nor sound-

I did not feel the unfurling of my love.