No More Learning

V

And now the lowest pine-branch
Is drawn across the disk of the sun.
Old friends who will forget me soon
I must go on,
Towards those blue death-mountains
I have forgot so long.

In the marsh grasses
There lies forever
My last treasure,
With the hope of my heart.

The ice is glazing over,
Torn lanterns flutter,
On the leaves is snow.

In the frosty evening
Toll the old bell for me
Once, in the sleepy temple.

Perhaps my soul will hear.

Afterglow:
Before the stars peep
I shall creep out into darkness.


LONDON EXCURSION

'BUS

Great walls of green,
City that is afar.

We gallop along
Alert and penetrating,
Roads open about us,
Housetops keep at a distance.

Soft-curling tendrils,
Swim backwards from our image:
We are a red bulk,
Projecting the angular city, in shadows, at our feet.

Black coarse-squared shapes,
Hump and growl and assemble.
It is the city that takes us to itself,
Vast thunder riding down strange skies.

An arch under which we slide
Divides our lives for us:
After we have passed it
We know we have left something behind
We shall not see again.

Passivity,
Gravity,
Are changed into hesitating, clanking pistons and wheels.
The trams come whooping up one by one,
Yellow pulse-beats spreading through darkness.
Music-hall posters squall out:
The passengers shrink together,
I enter indelicately into all their souls.

It is a glossy skating rink,
On which winged spirals clasp and bend each other:
And suddenly slide backwards towards the centre,
After a too-brief release.

A second arch is a wall
To separate our souls from rotted cables
Of stale greenness.

A shadow cutting off the country from us,
Out of it rise red walls.

Yet I revolt: I bend, I twist myself
I curl into a million convolutions:
Pink shapes without angle,
Anything to be soft and woolly,
Anything to escape.

Sudden lurch of clamours,
Two more viaducts
Stretch out red yokes of steel,
Crushing my rebellion.

My soul
Shrieking
Is jolted forwards by a long hot bar--
Into direct distances.
It pierces the small of my back.

APPROACH

Only this morning I sang of roses;
Now I see with a swift stare,
The city forcing up through the air
Black cubes close piled and some half-crumbling over.

My roses are battered into pulp:
And there swells up in me
Sudden desire for something changeless,
Thrusts of sunless rock
Unmelted by hissing wheels.

ARRIVAL

Here is too swift a movement,
The rest is too still.

It is a red sea
Licking
The housefronts.

They quiver gently
From base to summit.
Ripples of impulse run through them,
Flattering resistance.

Soon they will fall;
Already smoke yearns upward.
Clouds of dust,
Crash of collapsing cubes.