At whiles the loud avalanche the pebble feigns,
And sole the cause that biddeth thee yet fare
Is to fulfil the parle thou once ordain’d
With thine own self in pacing the bare air

With the selfsame lucence thou didst ever crave,
And with the selfsame chidings all too late
Which ne’er in mould of utterance thou gave
Till the last unseal’d flagon of the date.

Here do I warp the syntax in strange guise
By ev’ry sundry sleight my lore can frame,
Striving to keep the sense within me by,
Or mayhap striving to obscure the same

Behind the wonted rhyme and chiming,
That now no more hold poesy’s due grace
But serve as exorcism and as priming,
A physic’d purge I must still embrace

For in the murked noons, at last, I found
A feeble taper-light, whereby was shown
A secret nook in ruin’d depth unsound,
That bare my visage, wasted yet mine own.

Yea, certes, a wan visage and all fordone,
A series fraught with discourses astray,
A gaunt body, and pallid, and flesh and bone,
And a proud-seeming presence to gainsay,

Yet still a visage, and enow it was
At least to raise again the scanty beam
That keeps upright the hut in batter’d cause,
Kickt, spit upon by far too lengthy dream.

The eras end of me, and many wend anew,
Not pleas’d with the long course we went beside;
I greet them, wrangle, part in scant ado,
Awaiting next epiphanies to bide.

How may one be a man and hero stay
When such a breadth doth gape, marge to marge?
How may one dwell with non-mortal age
If e’en a day doth seem too fell a charge?

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(Im)pertinent Detour

In that season wherein the mountain keepeth its own ordinance and suffereth no man to read its purposes, there did pass along the high and stony way a man of uncertain years, whose feet had trod many such passes aforetime and found in none of them their proper ending. He pressed not forward with any urgency that might be named, nor yet did he loiter after the manner of the idle, but bore himself withal as one in whom an old appointment lieth yet unfulfilled, a parle contracted with his own self in some dim and prior age, the terms whereof had never been discharged nor yet renounced, but only deferred, as a debt that gathereth interest in the silence of unnumbered noons.

The air about him was bare and of a most pellucid lucence, such as he had craved aforetime with all the fervour of his younger desiring; and cold it was, and indifferent, as air hath ever been to the concernments of men.

Now whilst he yet ascended, there fell upon his ear a sound as of the great world unlocking itself from its own deep foundations and rushing headlong into ruin. And behold, it was no more than a single pebble, stirred from its lodging by the wind’s most negligent finger, that descended the white and silent slope in small and solitary passage. Yet unto him it came with all the majesty and dread of an avalanche’s fullest fury, for so doth the overburdened mind bestow upon the least occasion the whole terrible inheritance of its own inward tempest, and maketh of a pebble the presage of catastrophe.

He stood, and the imagined thunder passed through him as through a vessel both hollow and afraid, and was gone.

Then did he descend, neither as one vanquished in the field nor as one that goeth willingly, but in that third and nameless manner which belongeth to such men in such hours, into a valley of broken and unsound depth, where the noons came not in their proper brightness but dragged themselves through the hours in a murk and confusion, as though even the sun had lost heart for the office. And there, by the light of so faint and guttering a taper as might scarce be said to give light at all, a flame so meagre that the darkness pressed hard upon it from all quarters and did seem at moments to have prevailed, there was shown unto him a thing he had not looked upon in the compass of many years.

His own visage.

Wan it was, and all fordone, as the visage of one that hath spent long and fruitless years in discourse upon roads that led to no habitation and returned no answer. The flesh lay thin and unprosperously upon the bone. The bearing of it was proud after a fashion, yet the pride was of that kind which serveth more to gainsay than to affirm, which holdeth itself erect by virtue of denying what it cannot endure to acknowledge. Yet for all this, and herein lay the matter of moment, the crux that would not be dissolved, it was his own. Marked by long weather, wasted by long dreaming, harried by too lengthy a sojourn in the company of phantoms that had since departed; and yet his, recognisably and inalienably his, bearing in its ruin the faint and stubborn watermark of the man who had once, in seasons of a better light, believed himself appointed to some larger reckoning.

He wept not. He made no exultation. He raised the taper somewhat higher, that its poor dominion might be somewhat enlarged, and he looked upon that face as a man looketh upon an ancient deed of title to land long disputed, and he continued in his looking until the looking itself became a labour he could sustain, and then a little past that, and then a little further still.

They that had walked beside him along the long course of his going, some few, and then fewer still, had departed, one by one or two by two, with greater or lesser ceremony, some in wrangling, some in silence, some with the countenance of those that are not displeased to be quit of the road they have shared. He had greeted their going as best he might, and had abided thereafter in the expectation of what new epiphanies the road, in its own season, might yet suffer to be vouchsafed him.

By what art a man may sustain himself in heroic perseverance when the breadth of what he beareth gapeth wide as an ocean from one marge unto the other — this he could not compass in any utterance, nor had he language wherewithal to frame the answer. Only this he knew: that the hut yet stood, however it had been beaten upon and reviled by the long dream’s inclemency. That the taper yet held its flame against the pressing dark. And that his face, however wasted and however fordone, remained.

And that this was, for the present hour, sufficient.

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