It had begun to unnerve me, the way the nonhuman
World had, for nearly a fortnight now, kept beckoning
With a voluptuous calm easily mistaken for kindness,
While my brain raced with the metropolitan traffic
Of fender-bending social contending for righteous conversation.
The sand in the wash, scrawled by the relentlessness of ants,
Should not have inspired any thoughts of comfort in me,
But it did. What was the interior theater doing that it should
Want to embrace the play of a characterless world?
I thought of the urns of my mother and father, my late wife
And unborn daughters, ash finer than the sand or the pumice
Drifting down wash from the sumptuous, careless black cubes spilled
Across the cracked cliffs. In what sense had they returned
To the world in which all thoughts have first to disintegrate?
We only return by evaporating, evanescing, not being,
Which is like saying the day only returns by its sunset.
The stars, by the way, were lyric this morning before dawn,
The crescent moon slender enough not to outshine them,
My one living daughter bright enough to pick out the constellations
Pointed out to her, Orion and Draco, then return to the house,
Demand paper, draw the hunter and dragon: "I moved the stars
Closer together, so they could make a scene." Drama
Permeated the pencilled standoff, and somehow she had drawn,
Without knowing the story, Saint George and the Dragon,
Tarhunt and Illuyanka all over again. Later, where the lava
Stretched, fire exhausted on the all-absorbing sand, I thought
And wished I hadn't thought, that maybe the world thinks something
Other than us but through us, something calling us, understand.
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