The trees rise from the darkness of the world.
The little trees, the paper grove,
Stand woodenly, a sigh of earth,
Upon the table by this bed of life
Where I have lain so long: until at last
I find a Maker for them, and forget
Who cut them from their cardboard, brushed
A bird on each dark, fretted bough.
But the birds think and are still.
The thunder mutters to them from the hills
My knees make by the rainless Garden.
If the grove trembles with the fan
And makes, at last, its little flapping song
That wanders to me over the white flood
On which I float enchanted—shall I fall?
A bat jerks to me from the ragged limb
And hops across my shudder with its leaf
Of curling paper: have the waters gone?
Is the nurse damned who looked on my nakedness?
The sheets stretch like the wilderness
Up which my fingers wander, the sick tribes,
To a match’s flare, a rain or bush of fire
Through which the devil trudges, coal by coal,
With all his goods; and I look absently
And am not tempted.
Death scratches feebly at this husk of life
In which I lie unchanging, Sin despairs
of my dull works; and I am patient…
A third of all the angels, in the wars
Of God against the Angel, took no part
And were to God’s will neither enemies
Nor followers, but lay in doubt:
                                                   but lie in doubt.

There is no trade here for my life.
The lamb naps in the crêche, but will not die.
The halo strapped upon the head
Of the doctor who stares down my throat
And thinks, “Die, then; I shall not die”—
Is this the glitter of the cruze of oil
Upon the locks of that Anointed One
Who gazes, dully, from the leafless tree
Into the fixed eyes of Elohim?
I have made the Father call indifferently
To a body, to the Son of Man:
“It is finished.” And beneath the coverlet
My limbs are swaddled in their sleep, and shade
Flows from the cave beyond the olives, falls
Into the garden where no messenger
Comes to gesture, “Go”—to whisper. “He is gone.”

The trees rise to me from the world
That made me, I call to the grove
That stretches inch on inch without one God:
“I have unmade you, now; but I must die.”