The hotel breakfast china Poking ahead to the last week in August, not really Very much at all, found the land where you began …” The hills smouldered up blue that day, again You walk five feet along the shore, and you duck As a common heresy sweeps over. We can botanize About this for centuries, and the little dazey Blooms again in the cities. The mind Is so hospitable, taking in everything Like boarders, and you don’t see until It’s all over how little there was to learn Once the stench of knowledge has dissipated, and the trouvailles Of every one of the senses fallen back. Really, he Said, that insincerity of reasoning on behalf of one’s Sincere convictions, true or false in themselves As the case may be, to which, if we are unwise enough To argue at all with each other, we must be tempted At times—do you see where it leads? To pain, And the triumph over pain, still hidden In these low-lying hills which rob us Of all privacy, as though one were always about to meet One’s double through the chain of cigar smoke And then it … happens, like an explosion in the brain, Only it’s a catastrophe on another planet to which One has been invited, and as surely cannot refuse: Pain in the cistern, in the gutters, and if we merely Wait awhile, that denial, as though a universe of pain Had been created just so as to deny its own existence.
