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There was a message. I have forgotten it. There was a journey to make. It did not come to anything. But these nights, my friend, under the iron roof Of this old rabbiters' hut where the traps Are still hanging up on nails, Lying in a dry bunk, I feel strangely at ease. The true dreams, those longed-for strangers, Begin to come to me through the gates of horn. I will not explain them. But the city, all that other life In which we crept sadly like animals Through thickets of dark thorns, haunted by the moisture of women, And the rock of barren friendship, has now another shape. Yes, I thank you. I saw you rise like a Triton, A great reddish gourd of flesh, From the sofa at that last party, while your mistress smiled That perfect smile, and shout as if drowning— 'You are always—' Despair is the only gift; When it is shared, it becomes a different thing; like rock, like water; And so you also can share this emptiness with me. Tears from faces of stone. They are our own tears. Even if I had forgotten them The mountain that has taken my being to itself Would still hang over this hut, with the dead and the living Twined in its crevasses. My door has forgotten how to shut.

Already on the street with our money clutched in our hands, and the world is a white laundry, where we are boiled and wrung and dried and ironed, and smoothed down and forsaken we sweep back in children’s dreams of chains and jail and the heartfelt sigh of liberation and in the spark trails of feelings the fire eater the cigarette swallower come to light and we pay and distance ourselves with laughter.

On the street with our money clutched in our hands, buying bread and scattering breadcrumbs for the bluish doves. Paying to see the fire eater, the cigarette swallower and the dead vagabond who breathes. Greeting the palm tree that sighs at night. Saying a few words to the staring stone figure above the gate. Laughing and rushing in as if chased. In the cool kitchen we prepare and arrange our food. We make it as elegant as we can. Bouquet on the table and all. And we speak

Dawn comes later and later now, and I, who only a month ago could sit with coffee every morning watching the light walk down the hill to the edge of the pond and place a doe there, shyly drinking, then see the light step out upon the water, sowing reflections to either side—a garden of trees that grew as if by magic— now see no more than my face, mirrored by darkness, pale and odd, startled by time. While I slept, night in its thick winter jacket bridled the doe with a twist of wet leaves and led her away, then brought its black horse with harness that creaked like a cricket, and turned the water garden under. I woke, and at the waiting window found the curtains open to my open face; beyond me, darkness. And I, who only wished to keep looking out, must now keep looking in.

Miss A, who graduated six years back, has air-expressed me an imposing stack of forms in furtherance of her heart's desire: a Ph.D. Not wishing to deny her, I dredge around for something laudatory to say that won't be simply a tall story; in fact, I search for memories of her, and draw a blank—or say, at best a blur. Was hers the class in that ungodly room whose creaking door slammed with a sonic boom, whose radiators twangled for the first ten minutes, and then hissed, and (this was worst) subsided with a long, regretful sigh? Yes, there, as every Wednesday we would try to overlook cacophony and bring our wits to bear on some distinguished thing some poet sometime wrote, Miss A would sit calm in a middle row and ponder it. Blonde, I believe, and quiet (so many are). A dutiful note-taker. Not a star. Roundheads and Cavaliers received their due notice from her before the term was through. She wrote a paper on . . . could it have been "Milton's Idea of Original Sin"? Or was it "Deathbed Imagery in Donne"? Whichever, it was likely not much fun for her. It wasn't bad, though I've seen better. But I can hardly say that in a letter like this one, now refusing to take shape even as wispy memories escape the reach of certitude. Try as I may, I cannot render palpable Miss A, who, with five hundred classmates, left few traces when she decamped. Those mortarboard-crowned faces, multitudes, beaming, ardent to improve a world advancing dumbly in its groove, crossing the stage that day—to be consigned to a cold-storage portion of the mind . . . What could be sadder? (She remembered me.) The transcript says I gave Miss A a B.

A gunshot then. Stop your bikes and let them wobble in mechanism Then a gun watchman, hithered on the imaginary end of a macabre lipping telescope, broke my hero into speeches. It had to be masculine this many occasions consecutively and also diminutive from a hugeness I could not collect enough pipes and wizards on the trumpet trigger to build a trumpet or remorse or capitulate or boost my chest into order, for a basicness distortion gives, gives exegesis         Pedals coiling and scuffing the earth dust trusting lungs to come out in funicular or jigback. If I could just look to the minimalists, suss a sleek black wrist gathering the handles or clutching stacks of hourglass glasses to his grappling ribs at this one endless shop.    We looted

I have no name I am but two days old.— What shall I call thee? I happy am Joy is my name,— Sweet joy befall thee! Pretty joy! Sweet joy but two days old, Sweet joy I call thee; Thou dost smile. I sing the while Sweet joy befall thee.

My mother groand! my father wept. Into the dangerous world I leapt: Helpless, naked, piping loud; Like a fiend hid in a cloud. Struggling in my fathers hands: Striving against my swaddling bands: Bound and weary I thought best To sulk upon my mothers breast.

Her terrace was the sand And the palms and the twilight. She made of the motions of her wrist The grandiose gestures Of her thought. The rumpling of the plumes Of this creature of the evening Came to be sleights of sails Over the sea. And thus she roamed In the roamings of her fan, Partaking of the sea,

Where is the promise of my years; Once written on my brow? Ere errors, agonies and fears Brought with them all that speaks in tears, Ere I had sunk beneath my peers; Where sleeps that promise now? Naught lingers to redeem those hours, Still, still to memory sweet! The flowers that bloomed in sunny bowers Are withered all; and Evil towers Supreme above her sister powers Of Sorrow and Deceit. I look along the columned years, And see Life’s riven fane, Just where it fell, amid the jeers Of scornful lips, whose mocking sneers, For ever hiss within mine ears To break the sleep of pain. I can but own my life is vain A desert void of peace; I missed the goal I sought to gain, I missed the measure of the strain That lulls Fame’s fever in the brain, And bids Earth’s tumult cease. Myself! alas for theme so poor A theme but rich in Fear; I stand a wreck on Error’s shore, A spectre not within the door, A houseless shadow evermore, An exile lingering here.