[BNP/E3, 49A3 – 24-25]
Empty Hours
9/4/13
A silent † of purple light
Crometh the black green bulks of the hushed hills
And with an alluring, dim void delight
My sense of outer world twilight fills…
O light and mounts and {…} wake your hills
Upon my consciousness of solitude
Speak with your several voices of the nude
Life of the soul that your {…} thicks.
_______
O anguish of this over-perfect Hour;
Ashes of something fill my sense of life…
I am in some world-inch’s tranquil power.
But why now? How that {…} and {…} and stipe
And founding and are paling and are rife
With exile from themselves? I cannot know…
I fell a river of |silence| by me go
And some unthought thought cut me like a knife…
_______
O almost carnal[1] pregnancy of falling!
O feeling so akin to thought and sight!
What invisible ship in[2] me is feeling
Over to near †, to the sight
For at the left am I. What would twilight
Of terror fills me with a pain of being
With a void of no sense {…} nor seeing
An alien wonder that there should be light[3]?
[24ar]
2.
Wake not my heart. My wound is past thy value…
No worn from the caress can them form
To freshen what in me cannot be value…
Forget me! I am one who lost a home
Whose memory doth to him remotely come
Like a {…} voice of someone that we knew
And who is nothing but a lost voice, come through
This home like white light through a painted dome.
_______
My restlessness is not for |earthly| One
My pining is not one thou canst fulfil
Even with what thou art not; my heart feels pure
Yet with nought like remorse of our great ill
It might upon an earthless itself… Still
That † † of purple light prevails
The worried vacant and the {…} and shadowed glades
Wake already with sounds of night
_______
My wish is ever for Another Thing,
My thoughts are always with Immortal Hours,
My shoulder trembles with a thought missed of far wing
My thought of what I need {…} overpowers
My present self with {…}, like me with flowers
Southend… I am a ray, a {…}, a flight
My rest shall be under another light
Timelessly merging to a mourn not[4] ours.
[25r]
What canst thou give to aches that are of these?
What can thy hounds of lifes charm or alley?
Were I a bark on more-than-southern sea
I might be happy for a night and day…
Then the eternal moon would crave away
My newness in that world and I would be
The ever-old-man in that ancient sea
Under the same sky, blue or white or grey…
_______
What is the inner meaning of this sunset?
Has it another way of being it
Show this exterior in that is |time’s| unset
Upon my consciousness. Let the {…} hour flit…
What use is all that ever have spoke or writ?
Vain are our utterances of what we mean
For even I mean never what is heard or seen
On lips or pages… |We are not our wit.|
______
I lift my eyes again… There is no mean
Purple beyond the will… The will is now
A pupil nothing like
|The nameless sky… Time is sensation’s slough|
My trembling hand goes to my {…} bow
And I ache silently to shrink something.
At something… Let me be… Alright doth still cling
|To me of glenlike {…}|
[1] carnal /fleshly\
[2] in /of\
[3] there /life\ should be light /right\
[4] not /(of)\
