The Shapes of Death

Shapes of death haunt life,

Neurosis eclipsing each in special shadow:

Unrequited love not solving

One’s need to become another’s body

Wears black invisibility:

The greed for property

Heaps a skyscraper over the breathing ribs:

The speedlines of dictators

Cut their own stalks:

From afar, we watch the best of us –

Whose adored desire was to die for the world.

Ambition is my death. That flat thin flame

I feed, that plants my shadow. This prevents love

And offers love of being loved or loving.

The humorous self-forgetful drunkenness

It hates, demands the slavish pyramids

Be built. Who can prevent

His death’s industry, which when he sleeps

Throws up its towers? And conceals in slackness

The dreams of revolution, the birth of death?

Also the swallows by autumnal instinct

Comfort us with their effortless exhaustion

In great unguided flight to their complete South.

There on my fancied pyramids they lodge

But for delight, their whole compulsion.

Not teaching me to love, but soothing my eyes;

Not saving me from death, but saving me for speech.