THE SONG OF COLD AND PAIN
Colder than leopards’ eyes the arc
Where all the freezing stars go round,
Black wind runs trotting to the dark,
Striking cold hoofs on the cold ground.
The body crawls, the sinews scrape,
Knotted and cramped by fingering cold;
It shrinks my flesh into the shape
I shall not break from when I’m old.
And yet my shoulders lift the air
That weighs like ice, that pours like lead,
For cold’s a thing the flesh can bear
If desperation’s in the head.
The wooden head needs other pyres
To warm alive its wooden wits!
But in this cold there are more fires
Than ever burnt a sun to bits!
Inside of cold, inside of pain,
Past each last tingle of the sense,
The flame called God ascends again
In all its raging innocence!
It is the scarlets of the white,
It is the seeing of the blind,
More furiously clear than light
It burns like snow upon the mind.
I built my house with Pain for wall,
I filled its halls with Cold for wives,
And twenty years have bade it fall
And it shall stand for twenty lives!
I hung the doors with griefs I had,
Fear was a grape I crushed to wine,
And not an angel good or bad,
Can boast such feasting as is mine!
The fire that on my hearth exults
But Pain and Cold could throw and tame
Till now I know in every pulse
The last intensity of flame!
In that excruciating joy
Have Cold and Pain my judgment writ,
Though it exalt me or destroy
I must arise and follow it!
Life is a vapor, dreaming South,
A sleepy field ’twixt stream and stream.
Death is a dream that shuts the mouth
—Until you live inside the dream.