The Annunciation Part II

              II
           Thought
The garden is unchanged, the silence is unbroken. 
Truth has not yet intruded to possess 
Its empty morning nor the promised hour 
Shaken its lasting May.

           Intuition
The human night,
Whose messengers we are, cannot dispel 
Its wanton dreams, and they are all we know.

           Sensation
My senses are still coarse
From late engrossment in a fair. Old tunes 
Reiterated, lights with repeated winks, 
Were fascinating like a tic and brought 
Whole populations running to a plain, 
Making its lush alluvial meadows 
One boisterous preposter. By the river 
A whistling crowd had waited many hours 
To see a naked woman swim upstream; 
Honours and reckless medicines were served 
In booths where interest was lost
As easily as money; at the back,
In a wet vacancy among the ash cans, 
A waiter coupled sadly with a crow.

           Feeling
I have but now escaped a raging landscape: 
There woods were in a tremor from the shouts 
Of hunchbacks hunting a hermaphrodite; 
A burning village scampered down a lane; 
Insects with ladders stormed a virgin's house; 
On a green knoll littered with picnics 
A mob of horses kicked a gull to death.

           Intuition
Remembrance of the moment before last
Is like a yawning drug. I have observed 
The sombre valley of an industry
In dereliction. Conduits, ponds, canals, 
Distressed with weeds; engines and furnaces 
At rust in rotting sheds; and their strong users 
Transformed to spongy heaps of drunken flesh. 
Deep among dock and dusty nettle lay 
Each ruin of a will; manors of mould 
Grew into empires as a westering sun 
Left the air chilly; not a sound disturbed 
The autumn dusk except a stertorous snore 
That over their drowned condition like a sea 
Wept without grief.

           Thought
My recent company
Was worse than your three visions. Where I was, 
The haunting ghosts were figures with no ground, 
Areas of wide omission and vast regions
Of passive colour; higher than any squeak, 
One note went on for ever; an embarrassed sum
Stuck on the stutter of a decimal, 
And points almost coincident already 
Approached so slowly they could never meet. 
There nothing could be stated or constructed: 
To Be was an archaic nuisance.

           Intuition
Look. There is someone in the garden.

           Feeling
The garden is unchanged, the silence is unbroken 
For she is still walking in her sleep of childhood: 
Many before
Have wandered in, like her, then wandered out 
Unconscious of their visit and unaltered,
The garden unchanged, the silence unbroken: 
None may wake there but One who shall be woken. 

           The Angel Gabriel
Wake.