Still, Vicious Or Virtuous, Love Suits Most

If We Seriously Contemplate Life It Appears An Agony Too Great To Be Supported, But For The Most Part Our Minds Gloss Such Things Over & Until The Ice Finally Lets Us Through We Skate About Merrily Enough. Most People, I'm Convinced, Don't Think About Life At All. They Grab What They Think They Want And The Subsequent Consequences Keep Them Busy In An Endless Chain Till They're Carried Out Feet First.

So Many Things I Had Thought Forgotten Return To My Mind With Stranger Pain: Like Letters That Arrive Addressed To Someone Who Left The House So Many Years Ago.

Now, Helpless In The Hollow Of An Unarmorial Age, A Trough Of Smoke In Slow Suspended Skeins Above Their Scrap Of History, Only An Attitude Remains: Time Has Transfigured Them Into Untruth. The Stone Finality They Hardly Meant Has Come To Be Their Final Blazon, And To Prove Our Almost-instinct Almost True: What Will Survive Of Us Is Love.

Spring, Of All Seasons Most Gratuitous, Is Fold Of Untaught Flower, Is Race Of Water, Is Earth's Most Multiple, Excited Daughter; And Those She Has Least Use For See Her Best, Their Paths Grown Craven And Circuitous, Their Visions Mountain-clear, Their Needs Immodest.

Heads In The Women's Ward On Pillow After Pillow Lies The Wild White Hair And Staring Eyes; Jaws Stand Open; Necks Are Stretched With Every Tendon Sharply Sketched; A Bearded Mouth Talks Silently To Someone No One Else Can See. Sixty Years Ago They Smiled At Lover, Husband, First-born Child. Smiles Are For Youth. For Old Age Come Death's Terror And Delirium.