Last Meeting

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cold of outer space; this windy darkness; Scorpio above, a watercourse of light; the piercing absence of one face withdrawn for ever from my sight.