If we recall your voices
As softer now, it’s only
That they must have drifted back
A long way to have reached us
Here, and upon such a wind
As crosses the high passes.
Nor does the blue of your eyes
(Remembered) cast much light on
The page ripped from the tablet.
*
Once there in the labyrinth,
You were safe from your reasons.
We stand, now, at the threshold,
Peering in, but the passage,
For us, remains obscure; the
Corridors are still bloody.
*
What you meant to prove you have
Proved: we did not care for you
nearly enough. Meanwhile the
Bay was preparing herself
To receive you, the for once
Wholly adequate female
To your dark inclinations;
Under your care, the pistol
Was slowly learning to flower
In the desired explosion
Disturbing the careful part
And the briefly recovered
Fixed smile of a forgotten
Triumph; deep within the black
Forest of childhood that tree
Was already rising which,
With the length of your body,
Would cast the double shadow.
*
The masks by which we knew you
Have been torn from you. Even
Those mirrors, to which always
You must have turned to confide,
Cannot have recognized you,
Stripped, as you were, finally.
At the end of your shadow
There sat another, waiting,
Whose back was always to us.
*
When the last door had been closed,
You watched, inwardly raging,
For the first glimpse of your selves
Approaching, jangling their keys.
Musicians of the black keys,
At last you compose yourselves.
We hear the music raging
Under the lids we have closed.
[...] We can’t, as Donald Justice writes in his poem For the Suicides, know. At the end of your shadow There sat another, waiting, Whose back was always to [...]