How could I have neglected those manifold variants
Daunting in their recession
Perplexity yes but also defiance privilege stature and self-regard
The head thrown back the eyes steady
The face that says it all
And thus more that can be registered
Lips parted lids straitened
His mincing step that tends ever-westward
A chimera an indolence
A brief hiatus
An image arises not particularly vast
But recurrently unbidden
Dragging a gutload of anxiety juice
Pastoral terpsichore
And who will reel them back in
These meandering periods
Those that alternate between deliquescence and nuggetry
And those that rest inert
Until you start to yearn for any event
Any unforeseen cataclysm
To narrow the space
Its trajectory nearly exhausted
Worlds have been projected and indeed
Some of them
Their programs fully transparent
Clamber into that distance
Where limbs and organs beckon
As the sky streaks and races
Conscious of his pranks and preferences
The trancelike state the aureole
Has one found at last the mind capable
Of such self-control as to empty itself
Of all motive all deceit
Walls again and fortresses
A strategy of depletion
Tactics meanwhile of accumulation
Martial cognizance
And who’s to say
And is it right this deliberate forgetting
Even assuming that it’s possible
This posture of unconcern
Toward the past the future
Those dubious specters
The masquerade of innocence
More comprehensive and more approximate
Stature yes but diminutive to be frank
And in our moment of richest achievement
Real things obtrude