A complicated meditation on vexed personal relationships is leavened with energetic invention
No remedy, my retrospective friend,
We’ve found no remedy;
Nor from these fields the briared and barbed wire end
Can keep our enemy,
To mend the gaps
Would take perhaps a century.
So, praise each other’s poem though we may,
The day of easy speech
Succeeded soon by love and fright, and they
Made madness out of reach
Gave way in turn
To speed to learn, vain wish to teach,
Success and jealousy their unsought sons;
That day won’t leap again,
As when some amateur card trickster runs
His hands through all the plain
Cards, stuns the girls
When he uncurls the royal strain;
Or as the prober of the ancient text
Years after one rare find
Discovers in the margin the great next.
But not that day. We blind
Or vexed must be,
No remedy for our split mind.