Did we come for nothing? We thought we were summoned, the aging headwaiters, the minor singers, the second-rate priests. But we couldn’t escape into these self-descriptions, nor lose ourselves in the atlas of coming and going. Our prayer is like gossip, our work like burning grass. The teacher is pushed over, the bird-watcher makes a noise, and the madman dares himself to be born into the question of who he is. Let the light catch the thread from which the man is hanging. Heal him inside the wind, wrap the wind around his broken ribs, you who know where Egypt was, and for whom he rehearses these sorrows, Our Lady of the Torah, who does not write history, but whose kind lips are the law of all activity. How strangely you prepare his soul. The heretic lies down beside the connoisseur of form, the creature of desire sits on a silver ring, the counterfeiter begs forgiveness from the better counterfeiter, the Angel of Darkness explains the difference between a palace and a cave—O bridge of silk, O single strand of spittle glistening, a hair of possibility, and nothing works, nothing works but You.