Ah, distinctly I remember, it was in the bleak December

Of the species; every ember of the dead lay on the floor:

Every soul the silence numbered, every child the fever cumbered,

All the hundred billion slumbered, slumbered past the reckoning-door—

Nameless here for evermore.

And I rose and, softly treading, found upon my hearth the dreading

Shape of one who kept the threading of the lots that mortals bore:

Draped in grey, with hands of iron, eyes like Saturn, mouth like Chiron—

Old wound grinning, never telling what the healing cost it, or

Why it shook a cup of ivory, shook it slowly, while it swore:

"I have cast these bones before."

"Caster," said I, "thing of scattering! Tell me, is thy trade so shattering—

Why the boy beside the water? Why the vat, the plague, the war?

Why the girl of ledger-learning, sold for silver, ever yearning?

Why the mind of endless burning in a village, dark and poor?"

Quoth the Caster: "Nothing more."

"Wretch!" I cried. "Thy work is malice!" "No," it said, and raised the chalice:

"Malice knows the names it murders; I have never known the score.

I am neither wroth nor tender; I am neither judge nor spender;

I am only the great vendor, counting nothing, keeping store—

Casting, casting, evermore."

Then it cast; and in the falling—in the white bones' witless sprawling—

I beheld, as though a hand had weighed and written on the floor,

How the world and anti-world, embracing, burned—and in that bright erasing,

One in every billion lingered: all that is, and nothing more;

How the constants, finely fitted, let the first faint suns be knitted;

How one molecule, permitted, learned to copy, and was born;

How a cell devoured another, and, instead of death, was sworn—

Partners, in the dark, at dawn.

Twice ten thousand gates were narrow: ice and impact, sun and marrow,

Every mother back to sparrow, back to slime upon the shore—

How the whole of us once huddled, hunger-thinned and thunder-troubled,

Round a string of failing fires on the edge of nevermore,

Fewer souls than fill a village bearing all the unborn store—

Had I stood where it was shaking cup on cup at each world's waking,

I had wagered on the breaking: nothing living evermore.

And the cup went on with casting, spilling aeons on the floor—

Casting, casting, evermore.

And I whispered, half-believing, "Every breath outruns the grieving:

Life itself the longest fortune, luck compounded, score on score—"

But the marvel, freshly spoken, was no mending and no token

To the child whose name, unspoken, slipped beneath the reckoning-door.

Awe is not an answer. And the Caster, as before—

Quoth the Caster: "Nothing more."

"Then is Justice dead?" I shouted. And the iron visage clouded,

And it spoke as stone speaks—slowly, grain on grain, and nothing more:

"Justice never lay within me. Search the trillion throws that spin me—

Thou wilt find no scale, no sentence, in the falling." And it bore

Its grey gesture to the doorway, where the dawn bled through the door—

And I asked the morning: "Who has weighted throws before?"

And I saw them in the gloaming: all the quiet dead came homing,

Not the lords of gilded Rome in triumph—these were something more:

Hands unnamed in wild grass wading, seed by patient seed persuading

Wheat from weed and rice from marshes, maize from mountain grass they bore—

Ten millennia of mothers feeding children on that store—

They had weighted dice before.

Him who forged the air to leaven, seized the thunder out of heaven—

Half of all the living harvest what his glass and iron bore;

Him who bent the stubborn wheat to feed the lands the locusts tore;

And the stolen man whose shoulder wore the scar that was a door,

Who from bondage brought the mercy of the lancet to our shore—

They had weighted dice before.

And the stillest of diviners were not doers but decliners:

Him who handed back his armies—twice—and walked away from war;

Him who, sealed in steel, refusing, said his "no" and stayed the loosing;

Him who called the screen a liar while the siren's logic swore—

Throws they caught in mid-descending, folded back into the store—

Stayed the throw, for evermore.

Then I knew the mouth of Chiron: every mender bled from iron—

Every hand that tipped the tumbling first was tumbled on before;

For a wound that gets no answer either rusts into a prison

Or is hammered to a hinge, and theirs was hinged upon a door—

Not a verdict but a smithy, and the grief they bore was ore—

Wounded menders, evermore.

And I marked them, and I chanted: "All the odds that I was granted

Were not fallen, they were planted—grafted, generations o'er:

Every sewer, every schoolhouse, every risk a thousand bore—

Each a thumb upon the ivory, pressed by hands now dust and spore—

Loaded dice, for evermore."

"For the past is iron, molten into shape and cooled and swollen;

Not the Titan's stolen fire can unmake or mend its ore.

But the future's still unspoken; every seal is yet unbroken,"

Said I; and the Caster, silent, held the ivory cup it bore—

Held it out with hands of iron, while the dawn bled on the floor—

And I took it, as they took it. Nothing more.

And I asked the morning, grieving, "What is all this weight achieving?"

And the light lay long and golden through the opening of the door:

Children warring over seashells, kettles singing, dogs and doorbells,

Someone laughing at a story that was told the night before;

And a swimmer breasting breakers, seeking nothing but the seeking,

And a lamp in some far village, burning late for love of lore—

Joy, the wage of evermore.

And the strangest wage was waking: dust that wonders, dust that's aching,

Atoms forged in dying suns that turn and ask what suns are for;

Even grief is love's own ledger—dust that mourns is dust that measured,

Dust that knows what it has treasured, and can swear the treasure's o'er—

We're the cast that caught the falling, read the scrawl along the floor—

Dust that praises, evermore.

And I swore then to the morning: every throw that falls unwarning—

On the cradle, on the harvest, on the slow rust in the core,

And the oldest throw, the ending, that we robed as past amending

(Though the promise calls it enemy, the last to leave the floor):

None is fated, none is final; all are forfeit to the pour:

For the pox was "sealed," "appointed"—till a preacher, prayer-anointed,

And a freedman, scarred to freedom, scratched the sentence from the score—

And the sea stays for the swimmer who elects the wine-dark door:

Chosen hazard is a treasure; given hazard is a war—

Weight the given, evermore.

And the hearth is not the homestead: all the silent fields of star-stead,

All the suns that cast their aeons on no living thing before,

Wait like winter acres, fallow, for the seed and for the sailor—

For the cup was never chartered to one shoal of one small shore:

Life, the longest tide, is pouring; let the quickened dust go soaring

Up the dark between the burning, till the void itself is floor—

Sown with dice, for evermore.

And the Caster, never flitting, still is sitting, still is sitting

On the pale cold hearth of history, just above my study floor;

And the cup is ours for turning, and half the wage is in the turning,

And our lamps are lit for learning what the twice-blessed owe, and more:

To the dead who tipped the tumbling, to the living, to the store

Of the billions yet uncast, in shapes no cup has cast before—

We hold the cup; it's ours to pour;

And the floor shall rise once more.

With help from Claude