History has to live with what was here,
clutching and close to fumbling all we had –
it is so dull and gruesome how we die,
unlike writing, life never finishes.
Abel was finished; death is not remote,
a flash-in-the-pan electrifies the skeptic,
his cows crowding like skulls against high-voltage wire,
his baby crying all night like a new machine.
As in our Bibles, white-faced, predatory,
the beautiful, mist-drunken hunter’s moon ascends –
a child could give it a face: two holes, two holes,
my eyes, my mouth, between them a skull’s no-nose –
O there’s a terrifying innocence in my face
drenched with the silver salvage of the mornfrost.
Robert Lowell, 1917-1977 – “History” from New Selected Poems
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