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In Memory
     W. H. Auden

1.

Land sinking in its own time: the complete
history and meaning. Sea yelp between the old
blue thunder and smallest creatures. Existing
beneath the rip of birds; their skid-scream. And
the perpetual returning of fears. Winters hurling
the notion of precisions; the slow screams of decay.
Wide days with skilled doubts and the beach swallowed
by the wind. Walking here with your future and your
childhood locked into some secret hymn. Aware of the
creatures, the intervals, the tall days of conversation
following remembered ghosts. Everything changes within
the circle and the circle that you recognise does not
change at all. Time spinning mercy cradles what never came
and the songs hide in the old wound of rocks like broken
angels. It is not possible to forget any of this. Tokens
are taken and returned in the rhythm of these tides.

2.

Buildings: keeping their own time whether you leave
them or they leave you. The construction of lives and
white silences. That slow procession you inherit and
inhabit. If you escape the laughter the garden will
wait to present its slow murders. Nobody expects you
to die like this. Friends are the enterings, the lawns,
the drive; each day parades its small festivals and
search for events. Each night cat crawls round you
and sleep is a rush of stolen time. The birth bed
and sick bed and love bed and death bed. These stairs
like swollen clocks that your days rewind. And
children; more than anything else; measuring the past
in their present. Long after you have left the same
walls of disorder and chance; the same talk of revision;
the same intervals collected: slim intervals: new suns.

3.

Land came back to us. We did not go mad and nobody danced.
It was like laws seen through old river ice. The low moan of
constant recognition. A seed held in the winter land that we
sensed must be waiting. A psychic walk through the disturbed
ruins. What we take from this must be a signal of the future
more than hereditary, cradled in the family pain with words
like sealed tokens and those spoken wounds. The delight if it
can be expressed in new grass over the old stones, the agile
pebble roar in the sucked tide, small vow pressed into the
palm of identity. Land gives us this and takes back new form.
We begin in it, a folded territory and strange rivers we had
not seen before. The map does not say this. The guide was never
here. The release of the things experienced defeats manner and
moral and bondage. A song of kite flying in the mind.

4.

It cannot be said anymore in the memory. Old frog dies
in the blue grass. Old horse runs in the yellow fields.
Moon jarred, the old rose folds its broken music. And it
is not words. The glass sentences will never do it. Pages
fall across the mind like childhood thunder; the trees
have disappeared. Famous alterations to ones life catch
us on a mission to eternity and the moth will show us how to
die again. We gave our friends those gifts. We were so sure:
those hidden bells. It was another day. We were not lost.
We hid them slowly in those ruined years. Forgive the book.
Sell the dream. Fat ladies dance so certainly and the smallest
creatures die in their dreams.