It’s bad with large numbers. It’s still taken by particularity. It flits in the dark like a flashlight, illuminating only random faces while all the rest go blindly by, never coming to mind and never really missed. But even a Dante couldn’t get it right. Let alone someone who is not. Even with all the muses behind me. Non omnis moriar—a premature worry. But am I entirely alive and is that enough. It never was, and now less than ever. My choices are rejections, since there is no other way, but what I reject is more numerous, denser, more demanding than before. A little poem, a sigh, at the cost of indescribable losses. I whisper my reply to my stentorian calling. I can’t tell you how much I pass over in silence. A mouse at the foot of the maternal mountain. Life lasts as long as a few signs scratched by a claw in the sand. My dreams—even they’re not as populous as they should be. They hold more solitude than noisy crowds. Sometimes a long-dead friend stops by awhile.
