The Middle Passage

I think of the young, of their disbelief in dying:

Someone who is not there is at once a stranger;

It happens to another generation-always, fortunately,

Willing to slide off the ant-ridden globe.

My mother and father went too often to funerals;

Their lives seemed bleak to be so fond of ceremony.

Later I knew they simply went to say goodbye:

When they were old I saw they had no friends.

The landmarks, at the middle passage, began to go:

First the physician, my friend back from war

With the unexploded mine in his breast;

Next the architect, his spine temporal,

Malignant, his houses lighted and enduring;

Then the poet, his sun blackened in Spain,

Who lived among us by reflection for a time;

Now the great artery closed by questions,

The refugee stays as long as we remember.

Loss is unendurable until it becomes a fact.

There is an insight to be sought at noon

At the intersection of the busiest streets

Where only commonplace objects converge.

Here in the inescapable sunlight, discover

You are not the axle on which the world turns.

Abstract yourself like a number from the scene,

The landscape with its motions will not quiver:

The cars will roll on, the people buy and sell,

The officer will stand like a statesman,

The signals will stop and go, stop and go, stop and go.

Intolerable the pain until you surround it:

Neither happy nor unhappy, return,

Relieved of the weight of the axle

And armed for once with a fact.

There are no new words or ways to live with death.

The old ones keep their secret like a cabal.

The ego comes lonely, a recruit to his first battle;

It is not cowardice, it is ignorance about to be shot.