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      This is a love poem for you, Tanya—

      among wars, among the brutal forfeitures

      of time, in this house, among its latent fires,

      among all that honesty must see, I accept

      your dying, and love you: nothing mitigates

      —and for our Mary, chosen by the blind

      hungering of our blood, precious and periled

      in her happy mornings; whose tears are mine.

      7.

      There’s still a degree of sleep

      recalls

      the vast empty dream I slept in

      as a child

      sometimes contained a chaos, tangled

      like fishline snarled in hooks—

      sometimes a hook, whetted, severe,

      drawing

      the barbed darkness to a point;

      sometimes I seemed merely to be falling.

      The house, also, has taken shape in it.

      8.

      And l have dreamed

      of the morning coming in

      like a bird through the window

      not burdened by a thought,

      the light a singing

      as I hoped.

      It comes in and sings

      on the corner of the white washstand,

      among coleus stems and roots

      in a clear green bottle

      on the black tabletop

      beneath the window,

      under the purple coleus leaves,

      among spearing

      green philodendron leaves,

      on the white washstand:

      a small yellow bird with black wings,

      darting in and out.

      9.

      To imagine the thoughtlessness

      of a thoughtless thing

      is useless.

      The mind must sing

      of itself to keep awake.

      Love has visualized a house,

      and out of its expenditure.

      fleshed the design

      at this cross ways

      of consciousness and time:

      its form is growth

      come to light in it;

      croplands, gardens,

      are of its architecture,

      labor its realization;

      solstice is the height

      of its consciousness,

      thicket a figuration

      of its waking;

      plants and stars are made convergent

      in its windows;

      cities we have gone to and come back

      are the prospect of its doorways.

      And there’s a city it dreams of:

      salt-white beside the water.

      10.

      Waking comes into sleep like a dream:

      violet dawn over the snow, the black trees.

      Snow and the house’s white make a white

      the black swifts may come back to.

THREE ELEGIAC POEMS

       Harry Erdman Perry, 1881-1965

      I

      Let him escape hospital and doctor,

      the manners and odors of strange places,

      the dispassionate skills of experts.

      Let him go free of tubes and needles,

      public corridors, the surgical white

      of life dwindled to poor pain.

      Foreseeing the possibility of life without

      possibility of joy, let him give it up.

      Let him die in one of the old rooms

      of his living, no stranger near him.

      Let him go in peace out of the bodies

      of his life—

      flesh and marriage and household.

      From the wide vision of his own windows

      let him go out of sight; and the final

      time and light of his life’s place be

      last seen before his eyes’ slow

      opening in the earth.

      Let him go like one familiar with the way

      into the wooded and tracked and

      furrowed hill, his body.

      II

      I stand at the cistern in front of the old barn

      in the darkness, in the dead of winter,

      the night strangely warm, the wind blowing,

      rattling an unlatched door.

      I draw the cold water up out of the ground, and drink.

      At the house the light is still waiting.

      An old man I have loved all my life is dying

      in his bed there. He is going

      slowly down from himself.

      In final obedience to his life, he follows

      his body out of our knowing.

      Only his hands, quiet on the sheet, keep

      a painful resemblance to what they no longer are.

      III

      He goes free of the earth.

      The sun of his last day sets

      clear in the sweetness of his liberty.

      The earth recovers from his dying,

      the hallow of his life remaining

      in all his death leaves.

      Radiances know him. Grown lighter

      than breath, he is set free

      in our remembering. Grown brighter

      than vision, he goes dark

      into the life of the hill

      that holds his peace.

      He is hidden among all that is,

      and cannot be lost.

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