7.1.2012 • When I grow old (or, ELQ)

When I grow old

or ELQ

When I grow old

I'll have a prairie-house

With a vast garden;

Flowers will blossom

All-year-round

Within it and without.

The garden's trees

will be as tall

as are the tallest tow’rs of yonder stately hall;

But in the rooms

and corridors

and through the ceilings and the walls

there will be trees also,

And they will twist and they will bend

and crouch and slither roundabout

until they reach without and breathe

freely

free of me

On my floors

will be sprawléd

bows-and-arrows

made of gut—

th' intest'nal force and cruelty thereof

sated

by their internal strife

at human violence

(like anything inanimate

one can in fantasy

discern the workings

of their oppresséd spirits

bound to reaction none

but only dumb complaint

and sorrow unobserv’d)—,

broken horse-hairs and

strangled wood—

so bent by craft

and dented by neglect

as to be violins no more

but to the eye of memory—,

a ruin of harpsichords,

pianos unstrung,

the very swaddling-nurses of my mind's mouth,

all thrown about in perfect disarray;

and I will sit therein

and weep no more

but only look with eyes as dry

as dusty old sepia'd photographs of the sea—

a film of little housedust-mites

obscuring the blackness of my pupils—

but only look, eyes dry

and mind cut off

as if a tulle had settled

streched inside the dome of my skull—

all textured, making rough sand-paper sounds:

ssshcrrshhhsss and hhhshhhhh—

but only look—eyes dried out

and mind cut off from them,

a vacant chessboard

monotonously chequered

floating on the table

beneath my gaze—

in complete stillness

at that thing behind the wall

behind the wardrobe that's in front of it

behind the window that's behind

behind the end of sight

between my brain and thinnest bone-plate of my skull

a sea-horse driéd in the sun