Levavi Oculos Poem by Ernest Hilbert

St. Peter's Churchyard, Philadelphia

My parched heart slithers in its soaked bone chest,
Gorges on embers and crackles to ash.
Winter twigs are splayed like petrified veins,
Skeletal fingers to cradle a bare nest.
All sources of concern—debts, deaths, markets' crash—
Flit like late, fast leaves across these cold lanes,
Beneath a sky scribbled oily with cloud.
Allow me, for now, to fail and pursue
As I must—small, awkward force, aimed at dust.
Naval captains, native chiefs, whether proud
Or poor, now form a vast weight under my shoes.
Overhead, a flagrant scuttle and rush:
Such extravagant, vagrant vitality,
Branches rebound; squirrels spring from tree to tree.