saturday poem

before i could be here i needed to be up the hill- standing - looking - having that far off space.  i needed to move and walk out kinks and think and wonder.  so i did and now am back.  it's a cloudy day, and a day to reread poems that meant different things when i first read them and change with me as my eyes are grown by my years.  somehow- the words are just as beautiful maybe even more now.

from East Coker- T.S. Eliot

Home is where one starts from. As we grow older
The world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated
Of dead and living. Not the intense moment
Isolated, with no before and after,
But a lifetime burning in every moment
And not the lifetime of one man only
But of old stones that cannot be deciphered.
There is a time for the evening under starlight,
A time for the evening under lamplight
(the evening with the photograph album).
Love is most nearly itself
When here and now cease to matter. 

Old men ought to be explorers
Here and there does not matter
We must be still and still moving
Into another intensity
For a further union, a deeper communion
Through the dark cold and empty desolation,
The wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters
Of the petrel and the porpoise. In my end is my beginning.