You cannot see them from the road: go far and deep, Down the long avenues where mosses cover up the leaves, Across the empty terraced lawns neglected and asleep, To the still place where no dog barks and no dove grieves, And a black mirror gives you back your face too white In pools dyed jet by cypress roots: go deep and far, Deep into time, far into crumbling spaces and half-light To where they stand, our Egypt and our Nineveh. Deep in a deathly stillness stand the planters' houses.
The garlands and the little foxes' faces carved Upon the mantels look on empty walls and water-stains And the stairs tremble though so elegantly curved (Outside are waiting the bright creeping vines), And as your foot falls in the silences, you guess Decay has been arrested for a moment in the wall, But the gray plumes upon the trees in deathly loveliness Will stir when you have passed, and somewhere a stone fall. Deep in a deathly stillness stand the planters' houses.
There is no rice now and the world that sprang from it Like an azalea, brilliant from the swamps, has crumbled. A single century, it is embalmed as Egypt. A single century, and all that elegance was humbled— While we who fired that world and watched it burn Come every spring to whisper near the tomb, To stare, a little shaken, where the mosses mourn And the azaleas and magnolias have not ceased to bloom. Deep in a deathly stillness stand the planters' houses.
