The heads of strong old age are beautiful

Undressed myself of laughable prides and infirmities,But not as a manUndresses to creep into bed, but like an athleteStripping for the race.The delicate ravel of nerves that made me a measurerOf certain fictionsCalled good and evil; that made me contract with painAnd expand with pleasure;Fussily adjusted like a little electroscope:That’s gone, it is true;(I never…

the incident stuck itself in my memoryMore than a flight of band-tail pigeons might have doneBecause those wings of man and potential war seemed really intrusiveabove the remote canyon.They changed it; I cannot say they profaned it, but the memoryAll day remained like a false note in familiar music, and suggestedno doubtThe counter-fantasy that came…

Someone had given it to my father my eyes at five years oldused to devour it by the hour.I look at a Greek coin, four-drachma piece struck by Lysimachus:young Alexander’s headWith the horns of Ammon and brave brow-ridges, the brightpride and immortal youth and wild sensitiveness.I think of Achilles, Sappho, the Nike. I think of…

Why should you live longer than others? The vacuum that suckedUs down, and the former stars, draws at you also.No wrench for a man near ninety.They were younger who crowded us out of distinction the year you drove themLike flies on a fire. We don’t say it was wrong.We don’t say it was right.These heavy…

And protest, only a bubble in the molten mass, pops and sighs out, and themass hardens,I sadly smiling remember that the flower fades to make fruit, the fruit rotsto make earth.Out of the mother; and through the spring exultances, ripeness and deca-dence; and home to the mother.You making haste haste on decay: not blameworthy; life…

bronzeAnd the iron age; iron the unstable metal;Steel made of iron, unstable as his mother; the tow-ered-up citiesWill be stains of rust on mounds of plaster.Roots will not pierce the heaps for a time, kind rainswill cure them,Then nothing will remain of the iron ageAnd all these people but a thigh-bone or so, a poemStuck…