Set in a Fictional Present in Saint George, Utah, 30 September 2018

Another month is almost over, and there is
Nothing more arbitrary as a measure than
A month. A month can’t even match another
Month. And yet we arrange our lives around
These nothings dead samples of us invented.
The quality of nothing hath not such need
To hide itself. It is hidden. Hidden as itself.
Stand out under the stars if you are lucky
Enough to be able to see many stars. Ask
Yourself, whatever your deeply cherished
Set of theological, ideological, utterly borrowed
Beliefs, am I captive to a description
That exists only because millions of minds
Like me, outside of me, have scripted it?
Yes. The answer, if you were wondering,
As you read this, if any mind reads this,
Is yes. You are the captive of your beliefs.

Paperwork Underwater, Saint George, Utah, 29 September 2018

Sometimes, after sex, if you were well
Pleased with the results, especially well,
You would weep, briefly, and I could see
Diana’s moon jelly of tenderness pulse
In your teary eyes, then vanish. Back to being
Us again, two bundles of beings arranged
Parallel to one another under covers or,
As you preferred, under our picnic blanket
In the woods, on a lawn, on a cliff. Marriage.
Coupling. The public and the private faces
Of the special grief that never ends
In death but often begins well beforehand.
Doesn’t really matter who’s doing it, what
The local legislation and the ancient mores
Have to say about it. Bodies compounded
Of bodies, trillions of living cells, pulsing
Like jellies with desire, which is life, desire,
Line up as a pair of chromosomes, whether
The pairing of chromosomes in the event
Is likely, possible, improbable, or impossible.
Then, sooner or later, the ancients so much
Younger than the bodies their ideas inhabit
Will find a way to have their say. You may
Have lived in a time when this uncoupling
Or that coupling were outlawed. You may
Have been an outlaw, in another age, but
Today you are merely a floating awareness
Of a compounded being, holding a sheaf
Of printed paper, stapled by a secretary,
Stating you are uncoupled, again, this time
Not by death but, by definition, by divorce.

Last Light, Saint George, Utah, 28 September 2018

The sheerest honesty you could find
In any poem falls from Tracy Smith’s last
Half line, after a caesura so heavy it snaps
Into separate sentences, split statements,
One pretty lyric fragment, one bare gasp.
“Like a dark star. I want to last.”
She knows, we know, we all know, whether
We can drag ourselves half so close to candor
Or can’t, can’t, can’t. She, we, you, me can’t
Last. I like to stress the fact we’re falling fast,
But I’m rarely naked enough, transparent
To my own hankering as the wind rushes
Past. I know the landing lies ahead of me,
Know even the saints and sages have to smash,
Say it daily, like a mantra, toughen my eyes
By focusing on the crash. But I want to last.

A Hermit Conquers Nothing in Saint George, Utah, 27 September 2018

Looking out across a desert landscape
Pocked with irrigated trees and suburbs,
The eye was most often drawn to the rim
Of buttes, mesas, plateaus, rumpled red
Hills, black folds, and cream-colored cliffs
That ringed the scene like a cradling wall,
Or up to the high, expansive skies. One time,
However, it was the collection of steeples,
The seven distinct white-painted needles
That I could count sticking out from green
Clumps in low-lying housing developments.
Each one represented another Mormon ward
With its own tidy neighborhood to serve.
I had been reading another exchange
In the long running debate about Darwinism
And eusociality in various colony species,
Bees, ants, termites, naked mole rats.
Inevitably, one scientist opined, as if
He had secret knowledge, hermetic,
Possibly heretical, that, really, competition
Is much overrated, while cooperation,
Not to be too touchy-feely about it,
Was commoner than is thought and more
Powerful. This is a sub-debate in the greater
Debate about how cooperation evolved,
Given life’s apparent preference for struggle,
The inevitable limiting force of scarcity,
And every life form’s hunger. One side
Finds cooperation puzzling, aberrant.
The other side finds it fundamental, fine,
Maybe even uplifting. Then they quarrel.
Humans. Cooperation is both so obligatory
And so fungible for us, we are unsettled
By either its apparent absence or perfection.
Here, let me play the part of the scientist
Possessed of hermetic, heretical knowledge.
Cooperation is not an alternative
To competition, nor wholly not
Competition. Cooperation is
A competitive strategy, a type,
A wickedly effective and sophisticated
Type of competition. Cooperation
Amplifies competition, raises the stakes,
Ramps up the intensity, ever since the first
Cooperation between unicellular
Organisms, down through those billions
Of years of their aggressively aggregating
Descendants. Army ants are cooperators,
As are armies. As are lynch mobs, martyrs,
Gangs and churches. The greater the scale
Of cooperation, the more ruthless
The competition becomes. To miss that
Is to wholly misunderstand the nature
And function of cooperation. Cooperation,
If I may repeat myself, is murder. Still,
I like the pretty architectures of our worship.

The Navigator Aground in the Mountains, 26 September 2018

Not much happens. This is a long, dark story
And I will save it for another time. Inferences:
Time has passed; you were asleep; you will die.
These are not experiences. Inferences only.
You guessed time passed, you slept, you must die.
Not much happens on the bright, daylight side
Of the story either. One may itemize. (Jet,
Breeze, squirrel, doe, car turning around
At the trailhead and vanishing again.) Light
On the early autumn foliage offers clues
For inference and cues for leaving, but
Not much happens in the long, dark story.
Plato once composed a ridiculous analogy.
He imagined and asked us to imagine a ship
On which the captain was besieged by sailors
Who knew nothing of navigation but only
Wanted to seize the helm, in hopes of taking
The ship. Meanwhile, these ruthless idiots
Thought the true navigator a useless wordsmith
And star-gazer. Plato (pretending to be
Socrates) thus conceived the ship of state.
He meant, I suppose to flatter himself.
A navigator was a clever comparison
For a contentious philosopher, to be sure,
“See look, we with our heads in the stars
Are the ones really in the know, technicians
Of the practical means to reach shore.” But
On what ship ever was there neither knowledge
Nor respect for navigation? The buffoonish
Sailors and their captain are cartoons. I have
Tinkered with words and angered at stars
My whole adult life, and like pretend Socrates
I should know I don’t know at all where to go.
Not much happens, and then it all sinks at once
Or my ship comes in. One day. Maybe. Meanwhile,
Not enough happens out on the becalmed
Waves where the ghost ship without sailors
Tells stories to itself about true navigators.
Not enough happens to redeem what does.

Exile, Saint George, Utah, 25 September 2018

“The exile amuses himself secretly,
In thieves’ fashion,” wrote Chekhov
On Sakhalin Island. Oh, don’t we all?
Point me to the individual that never
Amuses her or himself secretly. The monk
And the nun amuse themselves secretly.
The hardworking housekeeper, the single
Mother, the politician and the celebrity
Maybe more than any one, are secretly
Amused. Thieves perhaps make the pattern
More of a mode, a passion, a fashion, but
Thieves, in this, have never been alone.
I’ll only admit the exile, driven far from home
Or from the means, at least, to try to create
A home, has more of the thief about him
Than the rest of the self-amused, more grief.

Harvest Moon, Saint George, Utah, 24 September 2018

The vision blurred, the not-quite perfect, full,
Complete disc of the local, drifting satellite
Showed a not-quite circle. Pi. If the cosmos,
Which most likely never meant to send us
Any sort of clue, should choose to signal
Something winking, ha ha, pi would do.
Likewise, if we needed a hint that our ratios
And numbers, however deft at prediction,
Better, certainly, than any wizards, saints, or
Prophets produced, were not actually truth,
The minor discrepancy, guide to madness
And lunacy, pi would do. Nothing measures
Perfectly as whole numbers, Pythagoras,
However many of us devoutly wish it true.
It’s a mismatched universe, and the moon,
Off-balance since before, well, well before us
Or you, continually falters in search of truth.

Small Hours in Bats Alley, Saint George, Utah, 23 September 2018

You can’t align poetry with the truth. They’re not
Two frayed ends of fractured bone to match.
I would like to opine poetry interrogates truth,
But that would not be true, not often. Poetry
Is a back alley among the teeming avenues
Along which facts, the actual, and lies, themselves
A fantastic palette of shades of deflection,
From creamiest white to purest confabulation,
With all sorts of umbers, ochres, and bilious
Green shadows of other-than-actual in between,
Constantly traffic. You could get raped, knifed
Or merely mugged in poetry. You could be bored
Or depressed by the dim light and the wretched
Stink of stale beer, vomit, piss, and dumpsters.
You could discover a graffito or soot-darkened mural.
You could sleep, homeless, at the interstices of power.
But you will not align with the truth, nor ever
Be fully free from it, neither. Poetry is
A narrow, maybe nasty, maybe risky shortcut
Between the parallel lines of the great debates.
It can be very useful for reaching or escaping
From the barricades. It’s a good spot for a secret
Kiss or grope. But poetry itself is only a residue
Of the metropolitan architecture of fictions,
Facts, and faiths. Truth? Lies? Nope. Nope. Mistakes.

AI Machine Transcription, Saint George, Utah, 22 September 2018

How is delighted that you had an opening
I could get to. I have the directions, okay, so
I got turned right now. So you’re recently
Divorced again, sign the papers last week.
That’s Frontera. La Western was Paula, and
How long ago she died in February 2008,
When child required in salmon sweet December.
Okay trim this sounds like a traumatic year.
It’s kind of a. My called something like a a Baptist.
Baptism, yes. Baptism in the outside that is this.

Untrapped, Utah, 21 September 2018

Hannah Gadsby’s right, you know. “No one
Is born ahead of their time. It’s impossible!”
Nonetheless there are those who remain
Manifestly out of sync with their Zeitgeist,
Whether there ever is, was, or will be
Another Zeitgeist could have mainstreamed
Them. Nobody’s ahead of their era, but
Some animals, more than others, remain
Defiantly alien. Perhaps it could be said
They belong most to the company of each
Other, whenever time may have taken them.
That company of the lost, never meeting,
Home in an era never started, never expired.
That’s the time zone devoutly to be desired.

Wholesome Doldrums, Saint George, Utah, 20 September 2018

It’s been a long change since there’s been anything
Interesting in this powder blue sky, weeks
By human reckoning, and is there any other
Reckoning kind? Please? And still no reply.
There was a span of centuries when the dust
Of the supposedly dark ages carried more
And more grass pollens and other evidence
Of expanding grazing lands and farms. Hard
To say how long anyone down in the valleys
Thought it would go on. The glaciers thought
Nothing, of course, they only accepted, although
It’s their record we’ve most closely inspected.
Then drought, then plague, then several years
When the layers of ice suggested all was gone,
Before the signs of farming began to float in
Again, later the coal dust, later the atomic tests.
That’s the problem with apocalypse, so terrible
And final for so many individuals, as all
Individual lives must be, but so temporary
An inflection in the demographic curve, so
Temporary the few years of peace. It will come
Again, it must, but for now there is plenty
Of dust, of “whales in the oceans, fruit
And duvets, the whole sumptuous parade,”
This side the next abrupt discontinuity in the crust.

Suspended Over St. George, Utah, 19 September 2018

The emperor wanted back his legions,
The mad king his new world colonies.
The creator only wanted back the stars.
Enough with the vast amounts of dark,
Dragging black curtains across the sky,
Dark matter, dark energy, dark prophecy.
He sulked in front of unimpressive canvas,
The artist with no new ideas. He had to admit,
However, finally, that the only thing making
His cosmos mysterious, featureless, and dull
Was that there were so many trivial, sparkling
Lights around here recently. Lights washed out
His dim distance and stuffed his darkness full.

Rose Glow, Zion, 18 September 2018

The light on the uplifted sandstone was the sun
Another day turned away from. A woman walked
A little dog wriggling with joy for the bouquet of the world.
Another woman vowed, over green goddess dressing,
She would go back and work on the dialogue
Between her orphaned character and the ghost
Who shared the road. A man in a cave accepted
That even if the light had grown poor, he had such
Luck to be perched at the mouth of a cliff’s perspective.

Red Mountain Wilderness, Utah, 17 September 2017

“It’s not like art where you’re trying to look
Like something. You’re trying to do something,”
Daughter said by way of explaining the difference,
As she saw it, between merely drawing and sketching.
The day before she had ridden through a canyon
On horseback, her first real ride, single file,
Ahead of her father and right behind the guide.
She hadn’t been trying to look like something.
She had been trying to do something, to look
For lizards, check, tarantulas, check, and coyotes,
Check, although she missed the one chuckwalla.
She had been trying to sit correctly, keep her feet
In the stirrups, and be good to the mare under her.
Now she wanted to make sketches, not just to draw,
But although she caught the winsome angle
Of a long-haired girl’s windblown approach
To a high, rock and pine horizon, she couldn’t quite
Capture the moon as it looked at the end of the ride.

A Half Dozen Poets with H Surnames, from the Shelf Easiest to Hand at the Bookstore, Saint George, Utah, 16 September 2018

Sorrow had always evaluated herself precisely,
Had understood to a nicety what others saw
And didn’t see in her, although she had trouble
Assessing her neighbors, who seemed to crowd her--
Companionship, with her embraces and squabbles,
Joy, who would interrupt at odd hours for no reason,
Jealousy, who always ended up drunk at the wrong door,
Pounding and weeping, disrupting everyone’s sleep.

Poetry, for his part, flirted with all of them, praised
Companionship the most, but insincerely, and
Joy almost as much, with the ardor of the hopelessly
Semi-requited, of the occasional lover, confused.
His real passion, however, was attested by the shelves
Of slender volumes, each eked out laboriously—
Jealousy, his staggering, green-eyed goddess
Who herself only wanted whatever he wasn’t.

Sorrow threw such sweet parties for them all,
Never quite daring to shove aside the rest and claim
Poetry her own, forever and quite rightfully.

Slumping Butte, Utah, 15 September 2018

No one gets to build an entire world, hold it,
And then watch it end of its own accord. But then,
We are each one an entire world, and is there
Something that built us to watch us end? Think
About visions of God for a while. What a thing.
His poor, great broken head filled full of sorrow.
There will be only one howling at the end
Of this universe, the creator deprived of creation.

Björk and Yorke on the West Desert Radio, Utah, 14 September 2018

Listening to the warbling, late at night, I’m thinking
There’s a history to the peoples of the north,
Beyond all the Viking sagas and longboat raids,
A secret history that hasn’t been seen as such,
But that’s not for me, not for today. Today,
Tonight, rather, I’m thinking how that secret
Hides more universally in this species that copies
And hides but will eat from your hand. All children
Are feral, even the ones who seem tame, who
Somehow find their own way to stray, like
Daughter, little kid, little normal, ordinary kid
Floating like a speck over the depths of her own
Deep. All children are. Are. Are only. Life tames us.
Secretly, nonetheless, under all our stories
And languages, we self-domesticated souls
Remain howling things at the shoreline near dawn.

Poisoned Wood, Pine Valley, Utah, 13 September 2018

Amid the green flaunting of the hours
Of peace, the living leaves have all become
The serpents and the flame-red flicker
Of the falling leaves their tongues.
All the trunks together form a fence-like weir
Within which the birds of souls, crying out,
Are trapped, the serpents’ tongues tumbling
Around them. But these are vipers lacking fangs,
So how is it the souls are poisoned and fall
Among the tongues, fall lost and ready to eat?
The chittering, competitive squirrels of words
That skitter along the branches of this weir
Serve as the knives. You will know the wood
Is poisoned when you see small shadows flash
Between the leaves, when birds fall bleeding
From the trees, fresh feathers grown in every gash.

Babylon Inquisitive, Saint George, Utah, 12 September 2018

The light changes fastest around each equinox
And slowest around the solstices. This may not
Be a fact, but that’s the way it seems to someone
Reasonably attentive. Excuse me, could you
Please point me to the religious equivalent
Of an honest polyglot? I’m fluent in a few, but I need
Someone to translate the rarer beliefs for me.
The snarling red pickup truck with its anti-muffler
Pretends to eat the evening by merely accelerating
To just above the legal limit down suburban roads.
Whaddya think of that? The same old thing.
I’ve quoted it for decades. I am not I. Pity
The tale of me. Every quotation adds a tree ring.
How fat I’m getting, the less I’m me. The thin
Must come haphazardly. If you aim to cheat
The Devil, you owe him an offering. And you best
Get it to him soon. If he can’t tell, it won’t matter.
And this isn’t now. And then isn’t then. Now, then.

Valley of Fire, Nevada, 11 September 2018

Seventeen years, okay, since downtown
Manhattan, pulverized, mattered to everyone
Way out here, since you could stop anywhere,
At any gas station or truck stop in the West,
And find signs of solidarity and sympathy
For New York. Seventeen years of slow war.
Who will be what? The characters speak now
In accents that never existed except as accents.
The real dialects left to us divide by convictions
Not pronunciations. Votes and bumper stickers,
The choice of preferred sources of news,
The choice of which freedom, which amendment
To consider endangered and worth a fight,
The very definitions of life and value and rights.
All of us claim to have chosen our roles but
None of us were given exactly our choices.
There is a cast of angels in heaven,
Of devils in hades, of ghosts in old closets
And stairwells. We move among them.
We are all tourists outside of our houses and cars.
The heat threat today will be extreme.
The rangers and officers will patrol the park slowly,
Looking for the usual minor violations.
The stones will continue to bake and to crumble
But so slowly that to see them shift like fire,
Like actual flames changing shape, would require
Turning all the tribes of us who visit them
To try to recapture our lost sense of wonder
Into blur, flicker, combustion and nothing, like smoke
Evaporated, only faster, like a shared belief that we
Were exceptional, that all our furies mattered.

Dissembling As Listening, Saint George, Utah, 10 September 2018

“Come! Let’s go to bed and make fun of people.”

Owners think they’re owners, but I know 

I’m not. The running lights of the flight

Approaching Saint George from Denver 

Shine in the early night. There was a novel

Started near here somewhere. There are

Children I can hear, down there, creating

Games and play out of shouting noises

And something, a ball maybe, they hit hard.

Owners think they’re owners but they’re not.

We’re borrowers to the last bossy kid saying

To the others, these are the real rules, obey

Them or not. Obey them, I said, or you’re lost.

The light has crossed the sky and landed

Out of sight. I’d like to make fun of owners

But owners are owners and I can’t if I’m not.

The kids shriek and command each other

And themselves, other selves, in the parking lot.

Radicant Aesthetics in the Mountains of Utah, 9 September 2018

Beauty was the messy, nutritious, disintegrating
Afterbirth of death. So, yes, Wallace, death
Was the mother of beauty, but beauty was not death’s
Daughter. Striving and the awareness of striving
Were among her daughters. Beauty helped.
Beauty nourished, orchestrated, communicated
Between mother death and each new offspring.
When death was weak and hungry, beauty
Even nourished her, helped death make more milk
To keep her daughters, all of us, growing, eager. Nor
Do all her lovely metaphors, consumed or functioning,
Belong only to the conceits of mammals such as us.
Death has other descendants, other vines
Entangling each other, beauty as byproduct,
The flowers that color their means without end.
The capacity to climb, to clamber over each other,
To cooperate and coordinate to find the light
And cover over each other, these are her daughters.
Clinging, parasitic radicants blossom the lissomest,
Loveliest forms of deconstruction, but we ascend
As hunger, not to make our meals, each other, prettier.

New Frontiers in the Evolution of Inequality, 8 September 2018

Can you afford to alter your offsprings’ genes?
Can you afford to customize your own? Can you afford
Cosmetic fins, cosmetic muscles, cosmetic wings?
Can you pay to be an angel? A super hero?
A super villain? Can you buy your own brain?
Can you have your new body tailored or can you
At least purchase designer corpses off the shelf?
Can you afford to swap out each of your organic selves?
Can you make casino dealers out of all the devils in Hell?

The Woods in Confidence, Utah, 7 September 2018

There is something to say here, and I wish
That I, delusion of self, could hear it
And repeat it, so that you, delusion of other,
Could hear me and repeat it. My head inclines
From a rocky perch to listen to the water.
The tiny stream runs under the trunk of the giant
Ponderosa, suspended by its spread roots
Like a gymnast or a circus acrobat, over the fall.
I have, I am, I inhabit a brain as sculpted as that
Stream and those roots but not cut out to make
Coincidental noises. To listen for meaning in them.
I incline. I am inclined to hear you, delusion,
Answering me, soothing me, the conspecific
Voice of a god, a ghost, a fairy sprite, although
You are water being pulled down, not speaking
So much as a word to me. I will understand you
Only when I’m done with dreams and with dreaming
Messages might be passing either through me or you.

Astronomical Odds, Saint George, Utah, 6 September 2018

The night watch keeps an eye on the sky.
Awareness of being one among aware beings
Is an impossibly esoteric, dangerously toxic,
Prohibitively costly, and perilously fugitive
Existence. It needs guarding while it rests,
And only one of its own can guard the rest.
The poet in the watchtower shifts from thought
To thought, wishing there were a password
One could demand of shooting stars. Wait
For it by describing the wait, over and over,
Every poem a snapshot collected for comparison
To every other poem, scanned by the seeker of pattern
Looking for that glimpse of dragon wings moving
Against the backdrop of repeated terms and rhythms.

Arbitrage of the Years, Saint George, Utah, 5 September 2018

These could be wealthy, but not the wealthiest,
Quoth the archaeologist, interviewed about a tomb.
Don’t you ever want to chuckle at the fact
That death is the greatest preserver of our lives?
We sold them dear and bought them back lightly,
To sell again as bones and treasured artifacts.
Of course, not all lives ever were thus preserved.
Many, most of our ancestors, missed the mounds
And middens to vanish in the perfect sin of life
And geology’s absolute recycling. But those
Bones, those gold leaves of metempsychosis,
Those sacrificed horses, they remained so to speak
Of relative wealth and status, of the longing
To transcend, to carry accomplishment onward.
We, who domesticated wolves and ourselves,
Have been dogs, proud of the trophies we’ve buried
To claim and offer as prizes later. Immortality
On offer, immortality, Dear, cheap immortality.

All But Touching the Hem of Night, 4 September 2018

We parse the divine. Why not? We parse
Sentences, and those too we made to remake us.
Those, too, now escape and define us. Nights,
I sometimes haul out on my balcony like an old seal,
A scarred and reproductively irrelevant seal
Not far from the many similar shadows ashore,
Hauled out on a peripheral rock. I watch the edges
Of the general bob, quieter at these hours but
Nonetheless in motion, aware and unaware.
The calm night is divine. The night is the divine,
The devas, the deevs, the devils we’ve made
Of dark and the stars. It descends like a gown,
More lovely, I suspect, than whatever corpse
It dresses. Corpus. I am an animal. I am many animals.
But I  am only one or a few awarenesses at a time,
While also host to invading hosts of ghosts, gods,
And sentence structures. Parse and parcels,
Among my thoughts, I note the lesser lights
Come from beneath that dim the distant sights.
Still over me, the night descends, of everything,
Of everything, and I can almost touch the hem.

The Difficult Done Easily, Driving Home from Vegas, 3 September 2018

I know nothing, literally, will come of this poetry,
Of any poetry, all poetry, given long enough.
At least I told the cosmos what I thought of it
Before it swallowed me back into it. Humans
Like slogans, like “speak truth to power,” but
None of us ever has very much power
And that only for a few years and mostly
Over each other. Even the terrible force a pilot
Drops in a bomb over unfortunate neighborhoods
Does not come from us, nor belong to us,
Certainly not any one of us. That is to say,
There is power in the cosmos, yes, but not
In us, and if we want to speak the truth we must
Address that power, which will swallow us,
Having generated us, as if it were so lonely
It needed tiny chattering offspring to destroy.

Sun Chair Bedroom Somewhere, 2 September 2018

The night is tired. You don’t know this, but
The night is always, has always been tired.
The stars are weary. The galaxies nod their spiral
Heavy heads, sleepy as poppies, black-eyed.
That’s exhaustion that goes by the moniker
Dark matter, and those are the stirring of many,
Many shadowy limbs restless for rest that go
By the ironic label dark energy. The whole
Mess is so worn out with its own messiness,
Longing for an all-too distant end to endlessness
That it can’t be bothered. That’s why we get
No answers when we query it, when we scan
Its scattered turbulence for anything as young
And eager to communicate as us. It’s not
That there’s nothing out there, or it’s not
Only that there’s no one. The night is tired.

Chilly Office, Saint George, Utah, 1 September 2018

I, who am known not to be in the office when
I should, have a habit of haunting workplaces
And classrooms when no one else is around,
Going back to my days in boarding school.
Another holiday weekend, and the suite
Is empty, super-cooled with no bodies inside.
What shall I do while I’m here? All the work
I can’t bear to look at when people pass by.
It’s not that I like to socialize. It’s just that I
Can’t think if someone asks me anything
And struggle to be polite when interrupted
Or even to allow the interruption. As I work,
I think of you, however, you who will never
Be able to ask me questions because I will
Not be available by the time you read this,
If you read this, whoever you are, dear
Reader who has given these silent word worms
Some of your time and mind. That makes me
Wish I could ask you something, instead.
Wouldn’t it be lovely if all books worked
Like ouija boards at Sandover, and we all
Could converse, actually converse, across
The centuries? You could ask, I could ask,
Everyone could ask and answer. Well, this will
Have to do for now. The office is cold and empty
Of you. I believe in you, but I should get back to work.