A mansion was to crown this subtle hill –
High-gambreled and august, it was to cast
One outline with its gradient and fulfill
The endless stone in air and spandrels massed
Above arcades arced from a separate past
When their debility taught these forbears well
To find the form, to build akin, to dwell.
Its only winds for a partition now,
For structure, only hopeless vacancies –
This pit and its browning swale, the gusts that blow
And bustle fronds of a strange denuded frieze
Rotting atop a framework of debris;
Their random lattice of decay and murk
The remnants of a season and a work.
Down in the depths of this artless desuetude,
Plumbed under habitat, under design,
Sere vestiges of a hard primordial feud –
Death and the hands that know it – waste to a sign:
Affronts of concrete, naked and malign,
Girders of cold steel, puncture through a crust
Imbruing their joints with gangrene and red rust.
All’s broken open, all’s been shorn to sight-
Under the soil’s now neither secret nor sin,
No sacrament, no trace of grace or spite –
Only a thoughtless mound where thoughts have been,
A cloven, vanquished dust – inert, supine,
Despoiled the moment her foe could comprehend
Things at their base, the ruin at the end.
What reverence for these endless blackened bowels
Wound underfoot? What homage for a clod?
Over the beige field and its wastage howls
A wind as thick and lifeless as the sod:
The ancient admonition of a god
Incensed at the outrage of her murderous brood,
The carnage of their sacrilegious feud.
And we, the augured monsters of her rut,
Coursed with their strange, their toxic enmity,
Who ravaged keenly through their mother’s gut
For warring on her very progeny –
A horrid and condign impiety
That left their lineage regnant and accursed –
Act in these last the violence of the first:
Unmothered, woke forsaken, thrown amiss,
Without a house in a place where winds abound;
Unsheltered and unshielded from the abyss
Our own irreverence summoned through the ground;
Confused by shards our hands have strewn around,
And watching by a structure grown absurd
For a promised gathering endlessly deferred.
Wind me in mosses under pointless walls!
Pull bracken for a solace to my eyes!
Encase me in the absence of these halls
To make a mausoleum of the skies!
I would be married to everything that dies,
Joined to the shadows that lengthen and devour,
Only to escape this grey deserted hour.
But that the destiny of this balustrade
For rising to an empty promontory,
Attests in ruin to a thing unmade,
Reveals in vacancy an absent glory;
But that this silent hole proclaims a story
Of settled and significant days enjoyed,
All that more brightly present in the void;
And staring through the vagaries of this pit,
Its arbitrary, lichen-festered maze –
Lashed by a wind that has no voice in it,
Confounded by a vain and restless gaze,
The deprivation haunts my heart to praise,
And by an insufficiency of cause,
To laud the reason that ought to be, and was;
Until the concrete and its random wear
Resolves to the legend of a tapestry;
These branches that encircle in the air
Measure out patterns of a tracery,
The ribbing of a hidden sacristy,
Where venerable hymns resound unheard,
And liturgies that bless without a word;
And I am rooted questing in this place,
Here where the earth was consecrated and scarred,
Interpreting in these stones the arcane trace
That’s left to us when all’s turned dumb and hard –
Here’s a foundation, howsoever marred,
A deeper altar salvaged from the ground,
Where soil and breath and hope and death are bound.
Thanks be to time for days and destitution;
Thanks to its constant strife with its own ends.
In these, despair bestows its restitution
For all that history dispossesses men;
In these the wind assumes its voice again,
Professing in its exile through the land
The presence that is fled, and near at hand.
