From “In Memory of Geoffrey Hill”

The day glared, breathless: an eye socket.

Clouds barely shifted, and the opal sky

was sheared into dry-dazzling millions.

Yet fall in, the sky, it did not.

The mail did not go undelivered,

dogs were walked; lovers fell savagely

out of and in love, and all between.

Seven concussed days, his draft longhand

swaying like supple pillars of gray flame,

erasures; in the long nights his desk lamp

revealed the window streaked with chalk

sweated off the fen, which was England.

Once Ribera’s Jacob, now Jerome,

Ugg-booted at the piano, “The Irishe

Dumpe” from the Fitzwilliam Virginal

hindered by the little lion kneading

his lap. Later, the papers howling

of guignol ambush would milk

his delighting spleen as the rectory

self-veiled in evensong and dusk.

Somewhere over an inexpressive sea

of rain-sleek tiles, the contemptible

perfection of gardens, perhaps up

from the weird moonlike muteness

of the Black Country’s broken kilns

and felt absences, it came winging.

He died without dread or pain.

A sour storm rides the Levant,

rinsing the domeless yellow streets.

On the steep road to Worms Ash

the coverts take the tincture

of foxgloves, where the shade

of Housman, deadly-formal kink

still running through him, fidgets

among the cinder-like moths.

Hill makes his way to Pisgah.