Let’s start in the middle, as usual. Ever since I burnt my mouth

I talk two ways, first as reluctant explainer, then as someone offstage

In a dream, hushing those who might wake you from this dream,

Imperfectly got up as a lutanist. Then sighs, whirrs, screeches

Become so much its fabric that one listens to see what words materialize

On the windowpane this time. I don’t want to make an uneasy habit

Of this though, because when the universe does turn into a horror movie

It will mean Japanese undershirts for the kiddies and unusual, invisible

Demerits for those of us caught talking back at the screen, unless, of course.

The unnatural peace God predicted for us has settled like a giant shell

Over the ocean floor, in which case we shall all be forgiven and forgotten,

Like students in a correspondence school. And I mean what shall be saved

Of us as we live aimed at some near but unattainable mark on the wall?

Not, one fears, a thing of hitherto unheard-of compacted density

That might relieve all the years with spaces in them, years of leggy growth,

Too much foliage, the wrong light, the wrong taste to things.

There is so much we know, too much, cruelly, to be expressed in any medium,

Including silence. And to harbor it means having it eventually leach under

The spiritual retaining wall that so commends itself to us we can never

Be other, and become a different habitat altogether in which these transactions

Are the brittle sounds of insect wings, robbed of the solid clink of something

Like the reality that now accosts one. It is all, we see too late, a question

Of having the knack, but the knack is as universal as the wind that now protects,

Now buffets, and is not ours. Thus, we are more formal this year, can escape

Certain confrontations, obtain the release of certain compromised acquaintances

Without looking at what they may have become, foil the plans of a few

Middle-echelon apparatchiks until the day that finally does come to rest, busily,

At your doorstep. Put it into a clean jar. Save it from the time which

Has been, without promoting it too far beyond the venetian blind of that

Future’s early demise, in which we saw ourselves pre-figured dimly and what would

Happen to us scattered all over the ground like bruised rinds. Only say what

Cannot be done to us, for now, and keep us ever straying over the border into

Insanity and back, and by then, becalmed, we shall know the superior discipline

As something lived within us, something that magnetizes everything toward us.

But beware the merely frivolous gesture, token of its own smile, which clamps

One supremely to one’s own past, in which one is lost. Better the negative

Volumes of the lives of strangers carried out to a certain point just this side of

Emptiness, so as to be done with it. And those who may be hungry, or thirsty,

Or tired; those who lived in a landscape without fully understanding it, may,

By their ignorance and needing help blossom again in the same season into a new

Angle or knot, without feeling unwanted again. So, at any rate, it is written

And believed by some few, a hundred or maybe a thousand of the summarily instructed.

Doors will forever bang in that wind, night moths assault the screens until

We know what we are thinking about once more. And that day may guide us.

So the dream curved back into something natural (it always does!), beached us

Where we started, furious at being safe and sound again. The old oar-locks

Encased in moss, the same tire marks in the gravel. And we come together

To quarrel or make love without any memory of the crabbed ambitions that were there

Before us, and may outlive us but we shan’t know this, it won’t make any difference

Even tonight as I lie here placing a finger now on one page of the book, now

On another, as though by planting it there I might outgrow the busy destiny

Predicted in those teeming lines. Really, it makes no difference:

If we are all going to be one, or together, in the space between the moment

I had this imperfect vision and tomorrow. Yet, as marble

Dust is gradually brushed away one does come upon it, that split-second

Interval as formal as a jewel, that an army of well-meaning enemies couldn’t

Possibly displace. I hear it calling to me. I must turn over a new leaf.

It is the extreme last chance for doing so. I want it so much. And then the world is

Shredded as a blanket waiting for this to happen, returns to it like a kiss,

To that agreeable triangle in a sea of asphalt where one so rarely has difficulty

Getting a taxi, and all magic works, the wicked and the only misguided.

I am recreated in the short-sleeved pajamas of my youth.