Deaths

[AdamSmith]

I have not done this for a long time. This week's spate of deaths of public persons, of all things, moves me to post this. I have been reading and rereading this thing for more than 30 years. When I was 18 it seemed too dry and abstract for its subject matter; now it puts me on the floor, weeping, for all those we knew who have passed beyond our reach.

The Owl in the Sarcophagus

Wallace Stevens

I

Two forms move among the dead, high sleep

Who by his highness quiets them, high peace

Upon whose shoulders even the heavens rest,

Two brothers. And a third form, she that says

Good-by in the darkness, speaking quietly there,

To those that cannot say good-by themselves.

These forms are visible to the eye that needs,

Needs out of the whole necessity of sight.

The third form speaks, because the ear repeats,

Without a voice, inventions of farewell.

These forms are not abortive figures, rocks,

Impenetrable symbols, motionless. They move

About the night. They live without our light,

In an element not the heaviness of time,

In which reality is prodigy.

There sleep the brother is the father, too,

And peace is cousin by a hundred names

And she that in the syllable between life

And death cries quickly, in a flash of voice,

Keep you, keep you, I am gone, oh keep you as

My memory, is the mother of us all,

The earthly mother and the mother of

The dead. Only the thought of those dark three

Is dark, thought of the forms of dark desire.

II

There came a day, there was a day--one day

A man walked living among the forms of thought

To see their lustre truly as it is

And in harmonious prodigy to be,

A while, conceiving his passage as into a time

That of itself stood still, perennial,

Less time than place, less place than thought of place

And, if of substance, a likeness of the earth,

That by resemblance twanged him through and through,

Releasing an abysmal melody,

A meeting, an emerging in the light,

A dazzle of remembrance and of sight.

III

There he saw well the foldings in the height

Of sleep, the whiteness folded into less,

Like many robings, as moving masses are,

As a moving mountain is, moving through day

And night, colored from distances, central

Where luminous agitations come to rest,

In an ever-changing, calmest unity,

The unique composure, harshest streakings joined

In a vanishing-vanished violet that wraps round

The giant body the meanings of its folds,

The weaving and the crinkling and the vex,

As on water of an afternoon in the wind

After the wind has passed. Sleep realized

Was the whiteness that is the ultimate intellect,

A diamond jubilance beyond the fire,

That gives its power to the wild-ringed eye.

Then he breathed deeply the deep atmosphere

Of sleep, the accomplished, the fulfilling air.

IV

There peace, the godolphin and fellow, estranged, estranged,

Hewn in their middle as the beam of leaves,

The prince of shither-shade and tinsel lights,

Stood flourishing the world. The brilliant height

And hollow of him by its brilliance calmed,

Its brightness burned the way good solace seethes.

This was peace after death, the brother of sleep,

The inhuman brother so much like, so near,

Yet vested in a foreign absolute,

Adorned with cryptic stones and sliding shines,

An immaculate personage in nothingness,

With the whole spirit sparkling in its cloth,

Generations of the imagination piled

In the manner of its stitchings, of its thread,

In the weaving round the wonder of its need,

And the first flowers upon it, an alphabet

By which to spell out holy doom and end,

A bee for the remembering of happiness.

Peace stood with our last blood adorned, last mind,

Damasked in the originals of green,

A thousand begettings of the broken bold.

This is that figure stationed at our end,

Always, in brilliance, fatal, final, formed

Out of our lives to keep us in our death,

To watch us in the summer of Cyclops

Underground, a king as candle by our beds

In a robe that is our glory as he guards.

V

But she that says good-by losing in self

The sense of self, rosed out of prestiges

Of rose, stood tall in self not symbol, quick

And potent, an influence felt instead of seen.

She spoke with backward gestures of her hand.

She held men closely with discovery,

Almost as speed discovers, in the way

Invisible change discovers what is changed,

In the way what was has ceased to be what is.

It was not her look but a knowledge that she had.

She was a self that knew, an inner thing,

Subtler than look's declaiming, although she moved

With a sad splendor, beyond artifice,

Impassioned by the knowledge that she had,

There on the edges of oblivion.

O exhalation, O fling without a sleeve

And motion outward, reddened and resolved

From sight, in the silence that follows her last word--

VI

This is the mythology of modern death

And these, in their mufflings, monsters of elegy,

Of their own marvel made, of pity made,

Compounded and compounded, life by life,

These are death's own supremest images,

The pure perfections of parental space,

The children of a desire that is the will,

Even of death, the beings of the mind

In the light-bound space of the mind, the floreate flare...

It is a child that sings itself to sleep,

The mind, among the creatures that it makes,

The people, those by which it lives and dies.

[MsGuy]

Twisting metaphors,

Wraith snakes from great Stevens' brain;

Wall-eyed, reach for Nips.