zippity do da zippity yea
"HOT TO GO!"
<<Old slogan of the 7-11 convenience stores during the mid '70's>>
infinity (an equally 'vast' subject)
'And Death shall have no dominion.'
When their bones are picked clean and the clean bones gone
(They shall have stars at elbow and foot;
Though they go mad they shall be sane;
Though they sink through the sea they shall rise again; )
Though lovers be lost, love shall not
...And death shall have no dominion
This poem's related to what 'And Death shall have no dominion' is saying:
Side by side, their faces blurred,
The earl and countess lie in stone,
Their proper habits vaguely shown
As jointed armour, stiffened pleat,
And that faint hint of the absurd -
The little dogs under their feet.
Such plainness of the pre-baroque
Hardly involves the eye, until
It meets his left-hand gauntlet, still
Clasped empty in the other; and
One sees, with a sharp tender shock,
His hand withdrawn, holding her hand.
They would not think to lie so long.
Such faithfulness in effigy
Was just a detail friends would see:
A sculptor's sweet commissioned grace
Thrown off in helping to prolong
The Latin names around the base.
They would not guess how early in
Their supine stationary voyage
The air would change to soundless damage,
Turn the old tenantry away;
How soon succeeding eyes begin
To look, not read. Rigidly, they
Persisted, linked, through lengths and breadths
Of time. Snow fell, undated. Light
Each summer thronged the glass. A bright
Litter of birdcalls strewed the same
Bone-riddled ground. And up the paths
The endless altered people came,
Washing at their identity.
Now, helpless in the hollow of
An unarmorial age, a trough
Of smoke in slow suspended skeins
Above their scrap of history,
Only an attitude remains:
*Time has transfigured them into
Untruth. The stone fidelity
They hardly meant has come to be
Their final blazon, and to prove
Our almost-instinct almost true:
What will survive of us is love.
The only constant in the universe,
is change.
What shall become of us is but
a new and different beginning.
For some other entity.
