The Tracks of Babylon

Bodily decrepitude is wisdom; young

We loved each other and were ignorant.

The hand grown tentative fumbles the pen.

He had been lost on the runic slopes and peaks,

He had whittled at the wedges strung out fence-like,

He had tangled with the hooks and whorls

Whipped into mysteries involuted

And potent as any coiled up in the grass.

Bull and plowman, sandaled queen and lion,

Brooding of eyes, all set in profiled

Stance and all dichotomized,

Lift from the crackling sheet their possibility.

In the leaning fixed bodies

Clammy-Hand fumbles for the furnace-

Hot heart, for the kinetic core

Yellowly burning.

Outside, the wind-blown rice harvest strains

For this old man nursing a cold limb.

The slavering maggots of his memory assault him:

When tiredness, like a blister, was mere fretting,

And pain left a curious token unaware,

A scab for wisdom to pick over.

If this hand seared and seared by terrible beauty,

That bared the buried Babylon to his eyes,

Could menace the coiled destroyer in the rice,

If it could swing in hooks and whorls

Despising (or missing) the dull stance of protection,

Then he might wear shiny both switch and pen.

Large sun-shapes sprawl across the grains,

But it's his dark and tilted vision

Shuts him in, man fumbling the dropped pen,

Peering, tessellating a much-tracked Babylon.