It is the sinners’ dust-tongued bell claps me to churches
When, with his torch and hourglass, like a sulphur priest,
His beast heel cleft in a sandal,
Time marks a black aisle kindle from the brand of ashes,
Grief with dishevelled hands tear out the altar ghost
And a firewind kill the candle.

Over the choir minute I hear the hour chant:
Time’s coral saint and the salt grief drown a foul sepulchre
And a whirlpool drives the prayerwheel;
Moonfall and sailing emperor, pale as their tide-print,
Hear by death’s accident the clocked and dashed-down spire
Strike the sea hour through bellmetal.

There is loud and dark directly under the dumb flame,
Storm, snow, and fountain in the weather of fireworks,
Cathedral calm in the pulled house;
Grief with drenched book and candle christens the cherub time
From the emerald, still bell; and from the pacing weather-cock
The voice of bird on coral prays.

Forever it is a white child in the dark-skinned summer
Out of the font of bone and plants at that stone tocsin
Scales the blue wall of spirits;
From blank and leaking winter sails the child in colour,
Shakes, in crabbed burial shawl, by sorcerer’s insect woken,
Ding dong from the mute turrets.

I mean by time the cast and curfew rascal of our marriage,
At nightbreak born in the fat side, from an animal bed
In a holy room, in a wave;
And all love’s sinners in sweet cloth kneel to a hyleg image,
Nutmeg, civet, and sea-parsley serve the plagued groom and bride
Who have brought forth the urchin grief.

When it is over—for it will be over,
Though we who watched it be gone, watched it and with it died—
Will there be none the less the yellow melilot, the white, the high sweet clover,
Close to the dusty, fragrant, hot roadside?
Oh, yes, there will!—
Escaped from fields of fodder, for there must be fodder still. . . .

Ah, yes, but nothing will escape ...

Yet sweet, perhaps, in fields of fodder still.

When it is over—for it will be over—
Will there be none the less, will there be still
In April on the southern slope of an orchard, apple orchard hill,
Red-and-white buds already fragrant, intent upon blossoming?—
There will; I know there will.

But for whom will they blossom?—
They will blossom for what, not whom,
I think—the streakèd bloom
Red-and-white, and the hardy fragrance, strong, all but visible, almost but not quite in sight,
Long, long before its pretty petals in a May wind fall,
Will be the finished apple in the eyes of all beholding it;

I see him well: the human creature studying the only good
A tree can be—stout wood
For building or for pulp whereon to print the expedient thing,
Or, if not that, food.
He walks through the apple orchard just now blossoming,
Dismissing to the necessary, the developing, past
The present beauty and the fragrance enfolding it.