Hic Jacet

I

They’ll keep on asking, why did you remain?

Not for the applauding rain

of hoarse and hungry thousands at whose centre

the politician opens like a poisonous flower,

not for the homecoming lecturer

gripping his lectern like a witness, ready to explain

the root’s fixation with earth,

nor for that new race of dung beetles, frock-coated, iridescent

crawling over the people.

Before the people became popular

he loved them.

Nor to spite some winter-bitten novelist

praised for his accuracy of phlegm,

but for something rooted, unwritten

that gave us its benediction,

its particular pain,

that may move its clouds from that mountain,

that is packing its bags on that fiction

of our greatness, which, like the homecoming rain,

veers to a newer sea.

II

I loved them all, the names

of shingled, rusting towns, whose dawn

touches like metal,

I should have written poems on the Thames,

shivered through cities furred and cracked with ice,

spat, for their taste, in some barge-burdened river.

III

Convinced of the power of provincialism,

I yielded quietly my knowledge of the world

to a grey tub steaming with clouds of seraphim,

the angels and flags of the world,

and answer those who hiss, like steam, of exile,

this coarse soap-smelling truth:

I sought more power than you, more fame than yours,

I was more hermetic, I knew the commonweal,

I pretended subtly to lose myself in crowds

knowing my passage would alter their reflection,

I was that muscle shouldering the grass

through ordinary earth,

commoner than water I sank to lose my name,

this was my second birth.