They live by an unceasing self-deceit in an eternal republic, by the vernal sin in the blue distance, as summer widens its increasing pardon. Clouds unbutton their bodices, and butterflies sail in their yellow odysseys, and shadows everywhere wear the same size. But the horizon is closer as the awnings fold and the flags and guywires are pulled down, and the field is left to its broad scar. Now the bleachers are too cold except for stubborn lovers who think that the night will say its stars for the first time. It is late for us to measure our footfall. And the dark slate Sound that is scratched with chalk lines, the lighthouses squinting in the fog, the slowly buttoned blouses make us walk slowly, Mayakovsky’s clouds in trousers. From the provincial edge of an atlas, from the hem of a frayed empire, a man stops. Not for another anthem trembling over the water—he has learnt three of them— but for that faint sidereal drone interrupted by the air gusting over black water, or so that he can hear the surf in the pores of wet sand wince and pucker.
