Last Days of Alice
Alice grown lazy, mammoth but not fat,
Declines upon her lost and twilight age;
Above in the dozing leaves the grinning cat
Quivers forever with his abstract rage:
Whatever light swayed on the perilous gate
Forever sways, nor will the arching grass,
Caught when the world clattered, undulate
In the deep suspension of the looking-glass.
Bright Alice! always pondering to gloze
The spoiled cruelty she had meant to say
Gazes learnedly down her airy nose
At nothing, nothing thinking all the day.
Turned absent-minded by infinity
She cannot move unless her double move,
The All-Alicee of the world's entity
Smashed in the anger of her hopeless love,
Love for herself who, as an earthly twain,
Pouted to join her two in a sweet one;
No more the second lips to kiss in vain
The first she broke, plunged through the glass alone-
Alone to the weight of impassivity,
Incest of spirit, theorem of desire,
Without will as chalky cliffs by the sea
Empty as the bodiless flesh of fire:
All space, that heaven is a dayless night,
A mghtless day dnven by perfect lust
For vacancy, in which her bored eyesight
Stares at the drowsy cubes of human dust.
- We too back to the world shall newer pass
Through the shattered door, a dumb shade-harried crowd
Being all infinite, function depth and mass
Without figure, a mathematical shroud
Hurled at the air-blessed without sin!
О God of our flesh, return us to Your wrath
Let us be evil could we enter in
Your grace, and falter on the stony path!