If you want to get on and get somewhere,
Lion with a crooked face,
You must learn to kill in the silent lair
And not in the open space.
And this cold, cold advice obey,
Bird with taloned feet:
It is easier far to take your prey
By dark and quick deceit.
By formulation from the sky,
Like the eternal sun and moon,
Your widening self-conscious eye
Must refuse the near and soon.
It is an art, it is an art
To see with and never through
The eye. Learn it, and learn by heart
To withhold the heart from view.
And out of the terrifying sky
The lamb is eaten up,
And out of the lion’s kneeling eye
Tears poison the cup.
We are withered out along the bough,
We decorate the root.
The sap rockets us up somehow,
But there is no green shoot.
We take the gleaming world from
Her nail among the stars
And keep her for Christmases to come
In a box that held cigars.
Then what will be left for us to hear
Listening to the dream?
Only those images of fear
That are forever what they seem –
Like the small element of death
In the breathing of the lungs,
And like the phlegm standing forth
On old men’s tongues.
No part, no part of it is real,
Man with an iron face,
Except from yourself you must conceal
The falseness of the place.
November 1978