You have been living now for a long time and there is nothing you do not know.

Perhaps something you read in the newspaper influenced you and that was very frequently.

They have left you to think along these lines and you have gone your own way because you guessed that

Under their hiding was the secret, casual as breath, betrayed for the asking.

Then the sky opened up, revealing much more than any of you were intended to know.

It is a strange thing how fast the growth is, almost as fast as the light from polar regions

Reflected off the arctic ice-cap in summer. When you know where it is heading

You have to follow it, though at a sadly reduced rate of speed,

Hence folly and idleness, raging at the confines of some miserable sunlit alley or court.

It is the nature of these people to embrace each other, they know no other kind but themselves.

Things pass quickly out of sight and the best is to be forgotten quickly

For it is wretchedness that endures, shedding its cancerous light on all it approaches:

Words spoken in the heat of passion, that might have been retracted in good time,

All good intentions, all that was arguable. These are stilled now, as the embrace in the hollow of its Aux

And can never be revived except as perverse notations on an indisputable state of things,

As conduct in the past, vanished from the reckoning long before it was time.

Lately you’ve found the dull fevers still inflict their round, only they are unassimilable

Now that newness or importance has worn away. It is with us like day and night,

The surge upward through the grade school positioning and bursting into soft gray blooms

Like vacuum-cleaner sweepings, the opulent fuzz of our cage, or like an excited insect

In nervous scrimmage for the head, etching its none-too-complex ordinances into the matter of the day.

Presently all will go off satisfied, leaving the millpond bare, a site for new picnics,

As they came, naked, to explore all the possible grounds on which exchanges could be set up.

It is “No Fishing” in modest capital letters, and getting out from under the major weight of the thing

As it was being indoctrinated and dropped, heavy as a branch with apples,

And as it started to sigh, just before tumbling into your lap, chagrined and satisfied at the same time,

Knowing its day over and your patience only beginning, toward what marvels of speculation, auscultation, world-view,

Satisfied with the entourage. It is this blank carcass of whims and tentative afterthoughts

Which is being delivered into your hand like a letter some forty-odd years after the day it was posted.

Strange, isn’t it, that the message makes some sense, if only a relative one in the larger context of message-receiving

That you will be called to account for just as the purpose of it is becoming plain,

Being one and the same with the day it set out, though you cannot imagine this.

There was a time when the words dug in, and you laughed and joked, accomplice

Of all the possibilities of their journey through the night and the stars, creature

Who looked to the abandonment of such archaic forms as these, and meanwhile

Supported them as the tools that made you. The rut became apparent only later

And by then it was too late to check such expansive aspects as what to do while waiting

For the others to show: unfortunately no pile of tattered magazines was in evidence,

Such dramas sleeping below the surface of the every-day machinery; besides

Quality is not given to everybody, and who are you to have been supposing you had it?

So the journey grew ever slower; the battlements of the city could now be discerned from afar

But meanwhile the water was giving out and malaria had decimated their ranks and undermined their morale,

You know the story, so that if turning back was unthinkable, so was victorious conquest of the great brazen gates.

Best perhaps to fold up right here, but even that was not to be granted.

Some days later in the pulsating of orchestras someone asked for a drink:

The music stopped and those who had been confidently counting the rhythms grew pale.

This is just a footnote, though a microcosmic one perhaps, to the greater curve

Of the elaboration; it asks no place in it, only insertion hors-texte as the invisible notion of how that day grew

From planisphere to heaven, and what part in it all the “I” had, the insatiable researcher of learned trivia, bookworm,

And one who marched along with, “made common cause,”

yet had neither the gumption nor the desire to trick the thing into happening,

Only long patience, as the star climbs and sinks, leaving illumination to the setting sun.