In Lincoln.(A new poem)

 
In Lincoln 
 
   Passing the south side, 
   His years turning heavier, 
   He did not need the cathedral 
   To warn him of the Last Judgment. 
 
   Nor was his room 
   In the hospitable college 
   Where he would speak the next day 
   A comfort for his unease. 
 
   He placed on the table 
   His reading for the morning. 
   Prepared for the night 
   He lay without sleep. 
 
   Deliberately calm, 
   Anticipating nothing, 
   He was overwhelmed 
   By a revelation of mortality. 
 
   Nothing remained 
   Of the tangible carpentry 
   Of door and window, 
   Nor of the cathedral's implacable mass. 
 
   The sensuous world had vanished. 
   His hands grasped a felt nothing, 
   His eyes stared at a visible nothing, 
   Nothing surrounded him. 
 
   He had no hands. 
   He had no eyes. 
   He was aware only 
   That he experienced 
 
   A universe of nothing. 
   And he was terrified, 
   Lay like an animal 
   In a world without animals, 
 
   Where form was an absence 
   Of form, sound an absence 
   Of sound. There was no use 
   For the music of breath. 
 
   He struggled against 
   A vacuum of time, 
   He groaned in his head 
   The physical words 
 
   He had brought with him, 
   Stammering ...