To claim, at a dead party, to have spotted a grackle,
When in fact you haven’t of late, can do no harm.
Your reputation for saying things of interest
Will not be marred, if you hasten to other topics,
Nor will the delicate web of human trust
Be ruptured by that airy fabrication.
                                   —Richard Wilbur, “Lying”

You wake and reach for the phone. No one is harmed
if you call your wife to claim you have seen the Pacific
at dawn, running for miles over the quick
blossom-and-fade of an image, on the glassy sand,
when the mist and the lightly stippled sea were a single
tone of gray. A simple invention. Meanwhile,
far below, the trackless beach and the green,
heaving ocean are beginning, only now,
to be disclosed in the wide panes of your room.
You wake alone. What have you done? Nothing,
or next to nothing, or let us say, you have altered
the sense of a thing in its telling, like Conrad’s Nostromo,
the fallen hero who stole the silver he was trusted
to guard. He wakes alone, on the half-moon beach,
on the island where he hides the cargo of ingots. To account
for this loss, he begins to invent a vita nuova,
for his life is his to shape, a lump of wax,
a blank, a dead space to fill, like the ceiling
of your neutral room, which you now begin to fill,
lying in bed, first with a fervid blue
from Annibale Carracci, and then with white and gray
bursts of billowing cloud, edged in pink.
Up the vaulting space, muscular figures