The great Evening has fallen and the world has grown tired
like a blinkered dray horse knock-kneed in its harness.
The trees are little green puffs and the flies slower and dimmer—
even the fire is tentative, though the shadows it casts
are profound and decisive. Babies cry a little coldly,
the whipped child feels no anger but only wants to sleep,
the spurned child says, if I were happy I would die anyway …
The hours on the sundial are stained with leaf mold,
the bronze bells toll and toll but they seem distant
even to the beadle with the rope. What is there to measure
now we have come to the unbinding, now days shorten and lengthen
in a single withheld gesture: dusk, nightfall, diminishment.
Perhaps the empire was overthrown a thousand years ago. All we know
is that comfrey opened cracks in the imperial roads.