Robert Lowell - History lyrics

History has to live with what was here, clutching and close to fumbling all we had--- it is so dull and gruesome how we die, unlike writing, life never finishes. Abel was finished; d**h is not remote, a flash-in-the-pan electrifies the skeptic, his cows crowding like skulls against high-voltage wire, his baby crying all night like a new machine. As in our Bibles, white-faced, predatory, the beautiful, mist-drunken hunter's moon ascends--- a child could give it a face: two holes, two holes, my eyes, my mouth, between them a skull's no-nose--- O there's a terrifying innocence in my face drenched with the silver salvage of the mornfrost.