History has to live with what was here, <br />clutching and close to fumbling all we had-- <br />it is so dull and gruesome how we die, <br />unlike writing, life never finishes. <br />Abel was finished; death is not remote, <br />a flash-in-the-pan electrifies the skeptic, <br />his cows crowding like skulls against high-voltage wire, <br />his baby crying all night like a new machine. <br />As in our Bibles, white-faced, predatory, <br />the beautiful, mist-drunken hunter's moon ascends-- <br />a child could give it a face: two holes, two holes, <br />my eyes, my mouth, between them a skull's no-nose-- <br />O there's a terrifying innocence in my face <br />drenched with the silver salvage of the mornfrost.<br /><br />Robert Lowell<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/history/
