Many Ends

Many ends, all in blackness
Where the dropped bodies fall
Like husks shucked for supper;
Many ends, where color fades
And person leaves for nowhere;
All impending, at the cliff edge ---
Where? and when will Nil
Consume my cosmos like brushfire,
Inhaling in dead heat the leaves of Fall?

Untitled

Out late upon the starlit earth of eve
Do I so wish to be; alone in shades
Of darkened forest 'neath a moon that fades
Into the black that gone horizons weave;
There, I wish to be with alien sounds
Of insects in the trees of all my mind,
Or light upon the dew-dropped fern so kind
And secret that it joyfully confounds
My deepest part, there in the veilèd wood.
With glowing tapestries of night to hide
My heart from all that cannot so abide,
I chant, wearing the silent Druid's hood,
A phrase of sounds no tongue on Earth hath spake
Nor ear hath ever heard, save only mine,
Alone beneath dark roofs of drooping vine;
Alone there, would I chant myself awake.

Damariscotta II.

No poem is as beautiful as that
Which wordless runs through corridors of rock
And moss, or hangs in bowers of wooded pine,
Up where the redbreast climbs to roost. No song
Is sung with such inspired harmony
As by the foam-lipped lapping waves below
The silt sand at the lake-edge, or by leaves
High, rustling in the sun-hot breeze of day,
Those viewless places of the tallest tree
No eye can ever see; There! music plays
Diurnal and unheard --- a chorus song
Of crickets and cicadas blossoming
Beneath some secret canopy of green.
I pray my song may always take from these
Its substance and its life, to live and die
Like earthen forms of dirt and leaf, or sounds
Of wind and crickets in the summer trees,
And like these, fall to silence once again.

Lines at Damariscotta

Hark! The loon calls ere the sun has climbed
Its morning tower; and the insects wake
Like fairies swimming to their temple spires,
Each pine and maple bower but an arm
Out to the boundless, cloudy blue above
My empty head --- and yet, I leave unsaid
That thing which seems to permeate it all,
A vague remembrance of some clearer vision
Through eyes of one far wiser than myself,
And yet, still me in some recess of Life.
I leave it all unsaid, for there is not
A word which may recall it to my head,
That holy Dream! All words remain but gleams
Upon reflective waters of the mind,
Unable yet to behold the whole truth
Of even little branches of the pine
That stands so timelessly under the sun.

   These words, though, looming formlessly before
The Mind's so silent eye, do subtle work:
The fruit of all the labors of the Bards
Has flowered ageless as a shining song,
Inspired throng of voices since the Dawn,
An ineffable monologue of Man
That sings in whispers on the lapping lake,
Or in the silence of the passing clouds,
Those massive, blooming ships! The Earth pours forth
Her song in Man, and Man, his song through her;
And though my words may capture not the truth
Of all my dreamy longings for a past
I cannot hold, if I but give my song
To Earth, she will return it to the stream,
The golden stream of ancient supplications,
Bardic incantations of holy mind,
The voiceless monologue outside all time
That falls in rain amidst the shine of day,
Still bright!
               
                    And so, I gaze across the lake
To banks of trees full-bodied in the sun,
And feel but one true Life within my heart
Extend unto the Universe's edge
(past even that), and listen to the song
That speaks to me in clouds of light above,
Those massive, blooming ships that carry me
Back to the holy place from whence I came,
The selfsame prophecy of ancient Man
Made new this moment by my very breath.
I soon forget the vain toil of meaning
That oft so burdens thoughts of mine each day,
And so resolve to let the sunlight play
Thus upon my face, forever.