Remember, imbeciles and wits
by Basil Bunting/Francois Villon
Remember, imbeciles and wits,
sots and ascetics, fair and foul,
young girls with little tender tits,
that DEATH is written over all.
Worn hides that scarcely clothe the soul
they are so rotten, old and thin,
or firm and soft and warm and full --
fellmonger Death gets every skin.
All that is piteous, all that's fair,
all that is fat and scant of breath,
Elisha's baldness, Helen's hair,
is Death's collateral:
Three score and ten years after sight
of this pay me your pulse and breath
value received. And who dare cite,
as we forgive our debtors, Death?
Abelard and Eloise,
Henry the Fowler, Charlemagne,
Genee, Lopokova, all these
die, die in pain.
And General Grant and General Lee,
Patti and Florence Nightingale,
like Tyro and Antiope
drift among ghosts in Hell,
know nothing, are nothing, save a fume
driving across a mind
preoccupied with this: our doom
is, to be sifted by the wind,
heaped up, smoothed down like silly sands
We are less permanent than thought.
The Emperor with the Golden Hands
is still a word, a tint, a tone,
insubstantial-glorious,
when we ourselves are dead and gone
and the green grass growing over us.
--
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Jon Corelis www.geocities.com/jgcorelis/
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