When You Are Not Surprised

When you are not surprised, not surprised,

nor leap in imagination from sunlight into shadow

or from shadow into sunlight

suiting the color of fright or delight

to the bewildering circumstance

when you are no longer surprised

by the quiet or fury of daybreak

the stormy uprush of the sun’s rage

over the edges of torn trees

torrents of living and dying flung

upward and outward inward and downward to space

or else

peace peace peace peace

the wood-thrush speaking his holy holy

far hidden in the forest of the mind

while slowly

the limbs of light unwind

and the world’s surface dreams again of night

as the center dreams of light

when you are not surprised

by breath and breath and breath

the first unconscious morning breath

the tap of the bird’s beak on the pane

and do not cry out come again

blest blest that you are come again

o light o sound o voice of bird o light

and memory too o memory blest

and curst with the debts of yesterday

that would not stay, or stay

when you are not surprised

by death and death and death

death of the bee in the daffodil

death of color in the child’s cheek

on the young mother’s breast

death of sense of touch of sight

death of delight

and the inward death the inward turning night

when the heart hardens itself with hate and indifference

for hated self and beloved not-self

when you are not surprised

by wheel’s turn or turn of season

the winged and orbed chariot tilt of time

the halcyon pause, the blue caesura of spring

and solar rhyme

woven into the divinely remembered nest

by the dark-eyed love in the oriole’s breast

and the tides of space that ring the heart

while still, while still, the wave of the invisible world

breaks into consciousness in the mind of god

then welcome death and be by death benignly welcomed

and join again in the ceaseless know-nothing

from which you awoke to the first surprise.

Source: Collected Poems (Random House Inc., 1970)