Sometimes I can almost visualize my life
As a succession of those states-
Feelings of finitude, inklings of infinity
And the occasional breath of a human detail-
And it terrifies me to think that those moments could comprise
everything I was ever actually going to feel.
But Dorothy Wordsworth went about her chores
In the throes of a dependency' 'so greatly loved
And so desperately clung to that it couldn't risk anything
But a description of the scenery in which it was lived; "
And somehow accomplished her imagination-
And the long walks her brother took
In a phase of mind at one remove from description
Seem almost tangible now, and as funny and real
As the minutiae of real life.
Only they seem' 'absolutely small."
Puffy-lidded, doe-eyed,
With the detachment that characterizes
The fanatic, to whom nights and days are like children's
stones
That don't explain anything but, taken together,
Make a fundamental kind of sense,
The sense of the mirror-
I thought I'd composed my life
Around a series of weightless moments,
And that each moment culminated in one of those remarks
People made at home, or overheard,
Or lost track of in a conversation,
And which were supposed to be as light as feathers.
But now I don't think anything like that ever really
transpired at all.
