The mightiest death invited me many times:
like invisible salt in the waves it was,
and what its invisible savor disseminated
was half like sinking and half like height
or huge structures of wind and glacier.
I came to the iron edge, the narrows
of the air, the shroud of fields and stone,
to the stellar emptiness of the final steps
and the dizzying spiral highway:
yet broad sea, oh death! not wave by wave you come
but like a gallop of nighttime clarity
or the absolute numbers of night.
You never came poking in pockets, nor could
you visit except in red robes,
in an auroral carpet enclosing silence,
in lofty and buried legacies of tears.
I could not in each creature love a tree
With its own small autumn on its back (the death of a
thousand leaves),
all the false deaths and resurrections
with no earth, no depths:
I wanted to swim in the broadest lives,
in the openest river mouths,
and as men kept denying me little by little,
blocking path and door so I would not touch
with my streaming hands their wound of emptiness,
then I went street after street and river after river,
city after city and bed after bed,
and my brackish mask crossed through waste places,
and in the last low hovels, no light, no fire,
no bread, no stone, no silence, along,
I roamed round dying of my own death.
