Found on the upper stories of The Haunted Tower:
Give me your silence, water, hope.
Give me your struggle, iron, volcanoes.
Someone awaiting me among the violins
Encountered a world like a buried tower,
Its spiral stairs corkscrewing into the earth
Beneath all those leaves the color of hoarse sulfur
Deeper still into geologic gold
Like a sword sheathed in meteors
I plunged my turbulent and tender hand
Into the most genital of earthly places
I pressed my face down through the deepest waves
I sank like a drop through sulfuric stillness
And, as if blind, I groped my way back to the jasmine
Of the exhausted springtime of humanity
He was painting himself
Black on the branches
To watch the crows
Who no longer flew high
But kept to the earth
I had no place where I could rest my hand
And which, rushing like water in a captured stream
Or hardened like a lump of anthracite or glass
Might have returned the warmth or cold of my touch
The eyes are not here
There are no eyes here
In this valley of dying stars
In this broken jaw of our lost kingdoms
I came to the edge of the iron blade, to the narrows
Of the air, to the shroud of farming and stone,
But such a wide sea you are, oh death! You don’t come wave after wave
But like a stampede of nocturnal clarity
Or like night’s absolute counting
Eyes I dare not meet in dreams
In death’s dream kingdom
These do not appear:
There, the eyes are
Sunlight on a broken column
There, is a tree swinging
And voices are
In the wind’s singing
More distant and more solemn
Than a fading star.
It is like this in death’s other kingdom
Waking alone
At the hour when we are
Trembling with tenderness
Lips that would kiss
Form prayers to broken stone.
…in the coming of autumn with its scattered coins
Of leaves, and between the spring and the ripe wheat,
What the greatest love, as inside a falling
Glove, hands over to us like endless moonlight.