The End of Regret

I

Regret, slow vacuum,

Siphoning the blood,

Seals up the running fever,

Kills, cures it with the dead.

The dead quiet the house,

Hollow the living eye,

Whose clearest hope is blind

To wake a leaf or star.

Enormous inward space

Of memory makes a room

For nothing but the lost

Light-seed that sprang the sun.

u

Sudden the dawn that once

Walked with the air of beauty,

That swayed like a pure tree,

Poisoning the tongue, the eye.

O no! it was the tongue

That poisoned the clear root;

The eye, insect of dark,

Riddled the leaves of light.

Tt was the end of flesh

But before flesh had time:

The sheet-metal of fire,

The covering cherubim,

Came down like lightning-strokes,

Draining the marrow's sap,

Aging the brook's mirror,

Bleeding the eye of sleep.

Yet, yet the ghost goes back

To wrest the burning sword,

And with no eye, no tongue,

Cries out the senseless word,

Transfleshed in paradise

To witness, rapt in air,

The still perfected world

Poised on the lightest flower.

u

Then have you but begun

Or have you ceased to live?

The leeching nail that wakes

Forever lets your love.