“What is the thing I would say to you Ere the time when we can say nothing at all, Neither you to me nor I to you, And between us is sprung a smoky wall? If I am left, I shall push the mist And crack my eyes to a gimlet point Striving to pierce its every twist And bore a hole through some weakened joint. But I know very well it will disappoint My keenest urge, and I shall be left Baffled, forsaken, and blind to boot, But with still the feeling that in some cleft You linger and watch and maybe hear The dim and feeble substitute For speech which may travel from sphere to sphere And hold itself perpetual Merging the there and here.
I am counted one who is good at words, And yet, in placing my thought of you Where I can see it, hard and clear, This, that, and the other, in review, I think that only the songs of birds Are adequate for the task which I Can never even make the attempt To come at ever so haltingly. I earn my own contempt That I should presume to try.
You have lifted my eyes, and made me whole, And given me purpose, and held me faced Toward the horizon you once had placed As my aim’s grand measure. Your starry truth Has shown me the worm-holes in Earth’s apple, You have soothed me when I dared not look, And forced me on to seek and grapple With the nightmare doubts which block the ways Of a matrix-breaking, visioning soul When, lacking the arrogance of youth, I started to carve the granite days Into tablets of a book.
The hundred kindly daily things, I have numbered them all though I may not speak them. Sitting here on this Christmas Eve, I think of you asleep above, And the house has a gentleness which clings, And a wide content of love. What you have said and what you have done, I should not have known enough to seek them, But now the very rooms you leave Have a peace which hangs like a hyacinth scent All about them. Your ways, your thoughts, I would surely rather lose the sun Than be without them. So absolutely is it I am bent To know how you are excellent.
Dearest, I have written it down For your Christmas Day, but not half is said. I might write so long it would span the town And yet scarce mention more than a shred Of you and you, and you and me; And of all that I know so well to be, How wretchedly I have scratched the stone! You must know the end instead.”