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- Contents Category: Poem
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- Article Title: Opus 77
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What works you did will be yourself when you
Have left the present, just as everything
The past passed to the present must become
A terrible unstoppable one blend
Of being there (the world) and not to be
(The Self). Grow old along with me, the best
Is bet to be – the worst (of course) lack(s) all
Conviction, as the poet mistranscribed,
Storming a grave to satisfy his pride.
They love me, all my words, despite how often
I made fools of them, betrayed them, begged
Forgiveness of them. They are like the million grubs
Which swarm around their Queen. I file them in
Wide boxes where they wait their Master’s Voice,
Accusing and defending. A letter plans
To burst in sullen flame, its heat conserved
By what was written once – but chiefly silence
Triumphs under missing banners – death
Will be the one unmentionable
Impossibility. What happened lives
Parenthetically and privately.
It is time to use words to transcend words,
To make a maquette of the ageing soul
Inside the tired body – abstract, oh
So abstract, but the mind anticipates a real
World trimmed like a Park of Dreams, where blood
Is its own sun and where the Self is both
The quarry and the hunter. We who made
A better place with Art (if we did well
Or pointlessly) are privileged to bow
And leave and hope to find the courage to
Confront the mad god of the Universe
And honour one more time those rational
Constructions we have loved. No word will bear
A leaf, since we are dying in our rooftop pots;
Our after-lunch inseminations bring
Cries beneath our windows: we should be
Big enough to fit the act of ending,
The sprawling melodrama of Creation,
And be polite enough to stroll away –
None of that poetic braggadocio
Of buggering off quickly: he meant the body
Not the soul, but arrogance still thinks
That flesh will go on listening, and flaunts
The several litanies of Godhead. Be
Like Haydn abandoning his last quartet;
Need neither saving nor redeeming; greet
The world of breathing and the silent world
With the same material gesture – a bedpost
Now the herm of lost vicinity.
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