There Is a Lake and Nothing Ever More
There is a lake and nothing ever more,
and the river is smoothed out in the gray mirror
no strand frames, no oar-strokes
ever will crack. O ye blest averted ones, ye dead
in self-sufficient beauty resting!
The envy of the gods disturbs not your peace. What
but a prolongation of the mandate is
the frail eternity they have been granted?
Bird-droppings tell of vultures near this place.
To free us from our sense of time and space
for us, in utter soundlessness, white bells
have rung upon these fields of asphodels.
Our shape it seems endures beyond our death;
at the check-point we leave pulsebeat and breath
but not the shadow of the self of me,
a hollow echo of a melody,
a last cold rattle from a curtained bed.
Our death's still incomplete; we're not quite dead.
For these birdsongless meadows hushed and strange
are but a whistle-stop, a place to change.
The ferry only took us-elderly
and infants-from one unreality
straight to the next, a little more remote,
all emigrants just waiting for the boat.
There where the dog barks and the noiseless door
shuts tightly rule the twins named Neither-Nor,
two vassal princes of a borderland.
None knows how man and woman differ, and
with barrier on barrier undone
old and young,
beggarman, king,
JUDITH MOFFETT
Thus do the winding-sheets and ornaments
fall, while the dog stares moveless and intense
at earthly life brought to its end. And thus
toward mirrordepths the river cradles us,
in formless rest reflecting, far offshore,
Narcissus dead and nothing ever more.
Structure
38 lines · 3 stanzas