I've offered many illustrations from Forth of July, many variations in scale & pitch, over time, here on this blog. This one's from toward the end of the poem, in a minor key.

         3


  
 
         I lost the purple thread
 that led to the heaven-stone
 (curled around a cup of golden
 mead... but not like lead:

  
         like honey, heavy honey,
 buoyant, thick and sweet
 forever).  One bright
 bird-voice cried to me:

  
         this lever, Archimedean –
 this little cup of water –
 if you did not offer
 to the least of men

  
         you offered not to Me.
 This lever, a mercy-pivot,
 rocks like a lonely swing at
 dusk... Love was, you see –

  
         and swung the empty swing
 you heard so long ago (one
 summer evening, so
 deep, so slow).  Swing,

  
         little wooden swing...
 my heart rocks too
 when we begin anew:
 Isaac and Abraham, singing...

  
         (and my little dark lady,
 absent one, my little honey-
 tree, my true heart's pivoty-
 stem, swaying so lonely).

                            
                    5.23.2000

- this poem reaches back in response, across about 900 pp. of Forth of July, to one of the opening, initatory sketches of Stubborn Grew:

It begins with the headache of a rational animal.
Sepulchred, perhaps, in a whitened rhyme
or bibliophile's musty drawers - reflective rim
or echo chamber, some titanic scuttled shell.

 
And you lose the thread, and this is the thread.
Purpled, from the mordant notebook,
from the charitable extinct awk's
last corkscrew into a cup of molten mead,

 
like lead.  The chorus and audience withdraw.
You are alone with the sound of an evening of a swing.
Here's the church, here's the steeple... here's the door.

Here the focus is on the protagonist/narrator alone, and the sacrificial-suicidal plunge he is about to take (into his long journey-poem). At the finale, though he has still "lost the thread", the mead is not like lead anymore, but has turned, alchemical-fashion, into golden honey; and the focus is not on the suffering of the hero, but on the love itself, which acts as "lever" (of justice) and "mercy-pivot", on the singing which it inspires, and on the "absent one", the "little dark lady", its ever-present goal. We have moved from the "door of the church" (in the poet's hands, as in the children's game), to the substance of its evangelic mission (love itself). The cup (of lead/honey) runneth over.