Shadows grazing eastward melt <br />from their vast sun-driven flocks <br />into consubstantial dusk. <br />A snow wind flosses the bleak rocks, <br /> <br />strips from the gums their rags of bark, <br />and spins the coil of winter tight <br />round our last meeting as we walk <br />the littoral zone of day and night, <br /> <br />light's turncoat margin: rocks and trees <br />dissolve in nightfall-eddying waters; <br />tumbling whorls of cloud disclose <br />the cold eyes of the sea-god's daughters. <br /> <br />We tread the wrack of grass that once <br />a silver-bearded congregation <br />whispered about our foolish love. <br />Your voice in calm annunciation <br /> <br />from the dry eminence of thought <br />rings with astringent melancholy: <br />'Could hope recall, or wish prolong <br />the vanished violence of folly? <br /> <br />Minute by minute summer died; <br />time's horny skeletons have built <br />this reef on which our love lies wrecked. <br />Our hearts drown in their cardinal guilt.' <br /> <br />The world, said Ludwig Wittgenstein, <br />is everything that is the case. <br />- The warmth of human lips and thighs; <br />the lifeless cold of outer space; <br /> <br />this windy darkness; Scorpio <br />above, a watercourse of light; <br />the piercing absence of one face <br />withdrawn for ever from my sight.<br /><br />Gwen Harwood<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/last-meeting-3/
