The cardtable is black, the cards are played face down,
black-backs on a black cloth; and soon by luck
I draw a card I wished to leave unchosen,
and discard the one card I had sworn to hold.
Dreams lose their color faster than cut flowers,
but I remember the number on my card,
a figure no philosopher takes to bed.…
Should revelation be sealed like private letters,
till all the beneficiaries are dead,
and our proper names become improper Lives?
Focus about me and a blur inside;
on walks, things nearest to me go slow motion,
obscene streetlife rushes on the wheelrim,
steel shavings from the vacillating will.
2. POINTING THE HORNS OF THE DILEMMA
From the dismay of my old world to the blank
new—water-torture of vacillation!
The true snakepit isn’t monodrama Medea,
the gorgon arousing the serpents in her hair;
it’s a room to walk with no one else, to walk,
take thought, unthink the thought and listen for nothing:
“She loves me too much to have my welfare at heart …
they just aren’t up to your coming home
three weeks, then leaving for a year. They just aren’t.
They can’t stand much more of anything,
they are so tired and hurt and worn. They go on,
knowing your real sickness is a fretful
deafness to little children … and suspect
it’s impossible for anyone to help you.”
Is my doubt, last flicker of the fading thing,
an honorable subject for conversation?
Do you know how you have changed from the true you?
I would change my trueself if I could:
I am doubtful … uncertain my big steps.
I fear I leave many holes for a quick knife
to take the blown rose from its wooden thorns.
A critic should save her sharpest tongue for praise.
Only blood-donors retain the gift for words;
blood gives being to everything that lives,
even to exile where tried spirits sigh,
doing nothing the day because they think
imagination matures from doing nothing,
hoping for choice, the child of vacillation.