The Attending

I

The Sunday endless on the wide bank,

The mill silent, the children

Half-sunlight in the spill and fall of white

Gold; a skill of blue-white,

Green-white, violet, where

They stand in shallows,

The burst to faint fire

Where they have leapt;

And where they stand or move,

These delicate shafts of light in light

Poised, trembling:

This grave dance

Attending.

u

From grey landscape, from the dusty web of roads

The roads turn, have turned

To the good village on the good day

Or the valley immediate in sunlight

Where we said

It was a good place, stayed

And were happy. We remembered later

How-but not quite how-the earth

Came to a brightening!

The year of our first child's coming

We traced, white on the grey of February

The first pale almond-blossoms

HENRY RAGO

From village to village, northward

Slowly to Rome,

And the gentle leap of that brush

Through Umbria, over

The earth-shapes, earth-colors, until

Suddenly at Assisi, it was

All of Assisi!

Gathered upon the hill,

A grace met with grace,

Well met,

Where it was good for us to be.

m

The words have shone and rippled and run like leaves

Or have risen like waves, sloped and broken

Endlessly, countlessly, counting one music

That waits there always,

As coming again after months or years

The car grinds over the last turn

On the last hill

And we find again or are found by

The unchanged music, keeping

That moment and the long day,

The hours of sleep and the vast promise

Spread bright from the awakening.

The words are

Broken on the poem as the waves are broken

As the poem at last is broken

On a farther music

And poem after poem-how many !-

Broken.

For these words' rising

And for the deep guess of their breaking

The hours and years

Slide huge,

Shapeless, nameless, to the poise

Of hazard crossed on hazard

And signed in the moment's

Luck of light,

Luck; by the thanks for it.

IV

Not in the sea but in this that changes the sea

And greets the Franciscan hill and hovers

On the dazed river and the slope and the delicate bathers;

In the breath shaping the song, in the motion between

The heart's motion and the pulsing world

Attend:

we are attended

And we attend. O courteous light

That holds these courtesies! Arches of thin fire

Leap with this swift love;

Ardors of air, alleluias of sun

Sing marriage!

Fame of this day:

Earth's fame;

Ours.