Empirical II

Empirical II

Empirical II

From the playing field, stone steps climb
into these acres of rubble where
between the train line and the gully tyre tracks lead away
in among head-high grass—Here where I vanish
into my life again the way a photographer walks off
into his photographs—a vault of light
in which every thing appears
down to its last detail—the smell of fennel, even,
rising where I step over the railway line
and climb the cutting’s side—when with single cries
wrens scatter up out of the grass like the reverse
of something breaking or that idea of place
which persists behind its uses—self-sufficient,
capacious, forever inventing a centre
elsewhere—ground I have seen falling in an instant
from the window of a passing train—
It did happen—It happened once—
Do you see them out there, figures among the stones
and their names for grasses? Out in that
unimaginable field in which wrecked worlds
heap their monuments, an accumulation of fragments
which only here convert themselves into a scene
like pictures on a vase—or is that an urn
in the mounds at their feet where painted Caesar is
gesturing at the curve—‘This victory I call peace
and remember in stone—’