Art of the Sonnet: LV

In negligent stone the old man superintends

his vanishing; it is clear I am his son.

No longer will you take issue, he offends

me at the ark; you and I go one by one.

I may wave in a kind of ofthand disaster,

but my prowl upon the limits done

though slow in grief in death is faster,

my father more to come, myself to shun.

I cry for an empty socket in the dark

if there be an eye for an eye. There's none:

I must take revenge out upon my own stark

self, and let fevers, like children, run,

run into the earth and count with him how

we number neither more nor less than now.