Classic Poem

Poems,
Poems,
What are poems but words
Set edgewise up like children's blocks
To build a structure no one can inhabit.

I fling you words,
Raw and bleeding
Out of my desolation.
Tock! Tock! The clock is no more monotonous than I,
Beating your name to every new vibration,
Aching upon remembrance with a durability
Which wears a knife-edge all along each shouting nerve.

Day and night wind round upon my loneliness
Coiling me in a serpent strangle of time.
One morning opens like another:
Sun on each wet bush and tree;
They laugh and rustle,
But I shut my eyes.
How wide the sky is!
And all that way the sun must go
Before another day will have been ended.

Lamps, work, and sunrise,
And again — again —
Always again, and each day tastes like powder
Brittle and salt.
And each night goes like water
Weeping along a heavy wall of stone.

And nothing comes.
It cannot come,
Since you are all that ever could have come.
I count them — one, two, three, and ten's a bundle;
A tally of burnt sticks
A heap of twigs,
With not one little bell-flower nodding up between them.

So then I take my blocks
And neatly place them
One balancing another.
I mock that ghastly clock and make a cupola of windows
And out of each I gaze awhile
Looking down long roads for you.
Then I put in a paved forecourt-yard,
And lay my smoothest squares,
And plant wide borders of campanulas.
But what I plant is nothing;
What comes up
Is fire-weed.
How often have I seen it
Glaring above the silver-grey of rotted boards
Where a deserted farmhouse
Was falling gently,
Each year a little more of it would settle.

Tush! This is fooling.
Words,
Words,
I think I hate them.
You cannot live in them,
And so they are no more to me
Than spiders' webs:
Tall, floating, ghostly webs.
Hanging above the candles of a church
When someone's to be buried.

Therefore I will put my words away,
And count the ticking of the clock
As men count pins in solitary cells.
To-morrow it may rain
And then, at least,
I shall not have to watch the terribly slow spanning
Of the sun
Across that reach of sky.