When, like a running grave, time tracks you down,
Your calm and cuddled is a scythe of hairs,
Love in her gear is slowly through the house,
Up naked stairs, a turtle in a hearse,
Hauled to the dome,

Comes, like a scissors stalking, tailor age,
Deliver me who, timid in my tribe,
Of love am barer than Cadaver’s trap
Robbed of the foxy tongue, his footed tape
Of the bone inch,

Deliver me, my masters, head and heart,
Heart of Cadaver’s candle waxes thin,
When blood, spade-handed, and the logic time
Drive children up like bruises to the thumb,
From maid and head,

For, Sunday faced, with dusters in my glove,
Chaste and the chaser, man with the cockshut eye,
I, that time’s jacket or the coat of ice
May fail to fasten with a virgin o
In the straight grave,

Stride through Cadaver’s country in my force,
My pickbrain masters morsing on the stone
Despair of blood, faith in the maiden’s slime,
Halt among eunuchs, and the nitric stain
On fork and face.

Time is a foolish fancy, time and fool.
No, no, you lover skull, descending hammer
Descends, my masters, on the entered honour.
You hero skull, Cadaver in the hangar
Tells the stick, ‘fail’.

Joy is no knocking nation, sir and madam,
The cancer’s fusion, or the summer feather
Lit on the cuddled tree, the cross of fever,
Nor city tar and subway bored to foster
Man through macadam.

I damp the waxlights in your tower dome.
Joy is the knock of dust, Cadaver’s shoot
Of bud of Adam through his boxy shift,
Love’s twilit nation and the skull of state,
Sir, is your doom.

Everything ends, the tower ending and,
(Have with the house of wind), the leaning scene,
Ball of the foot depending from the sun,
(Give, summer, over), the cemented skin,
The actions’ end.

All, men my madmen, the unwholesome wind
With whistler’s cough contages, time on track
Shapes in a cinder death; love for his trick,
Happy Cadaver’s hunger as you take
The kissproof world.

She hath no children, and no heart
In all our hurrying anxious life;
She sits beyond our ken apart,
Unmoved, unconscious of our strife;
Shipwrecked beyond these coasts of ours,
On some sad island full of flowers
Where nothing moves but memory;
Where no one lives but only he;
And all we others barely seem
The phantom figures of a dream
One dreams and says, "It cannot be!"

If sometimes when we talk with her
Those absent eyes light up awhile
And her set lips consent to stir
In the beginning of a smile,
It is not of our world nor us
But some remembrance tremulous,
Some sweet "Ten years ago to-day!"
Or haply, if a sudden ray
Set all her window in a glow,
She thinks: "'Twill make the roses blow
I planted at his feet to-day."

His tomb is all her garden-plot,
And rain or sunshine find her there.
She plants her blue forget-me-not
With hands but half unclasped from prayer;
Her loving mercies overbrim
O'er all the tombs that neighbour him;
On each she sets a dewy-pearled
Sweet pink or fernlet fresh-uncurled;
She plucks the withering violets;
And here if anywhere forgets
The emptiness of all the world.

Here, where she used to sob for hours,
Her deep fidelity unchanged
Hath found a calm that is not ours,
A peace exalted and estranged.
Here in the long light summer weather
She brings the books they chose together
And reads the verse he liked the most;
And here, as softly as a ghost,
Comes gliding through the winter gloom
To say her prayer beside the tomb
Of him she loves and never lost.