Of Deed, Love, Death

The soul dividing like an annalid
Suggests a remorseless possibility —

For our inclination is always the business unfinished,
The evening star’s rising above the evening star’s zenith distance,

A golden effigy of the impoverished immortal,
A scarecrow rattling in the sphere of no-crow.

Suppose one soul all souls like an annalid dividing,
A sickened worm which splits in perfect halves

The grave’s progeny then? O, no, the multiple beautiful
Quantums of all that was an all before —

The obliterated sphere preserved, not in the soul, but without it,
Completion, old eel-trap flowers in pools and torpid streams,

Old spiders who wear their skeletons outside,
A community of memories and substances without substance,

Vainglorious nasturtium, everything twice and all souls repeated,
The singular body swinging from the dwarf juniper

Infinities of bodies swinging from infinities of trees in regress,
O, the consequence of every finite deed, love, death.

But that which is possible and is not is not real,
Is less real than eunuchs in pre-creation’s cloud,

The soul, even in thought, a phenomenon merely
And in this way our consciousness itself abuts on nothing

In fact, not annalid or virgin birth
Or repetition of the conjunction of love and negative,

The theory passing into naught. True terror is each soul to seem
The shrivelled body hanging from a floating tree.