Knowledge defeats its own end
approaching the state of heaven
when it envisions

Spring: the first morning when that one true block of sweet, laminar, complex scent arrives
from somewhere west and I keep coming to lean on the sill, glorying in the end of the wretched winter.
The scabby-barked sycamores ringing the empty lot across the way are budded—I hadn’t even noticed—

“The summer has gone by both quickly and slowly.
It’s been a kind of eternity, each day spinning
out its endlessness, and yet with every look

The masters are yet dead. Wanting to be human, 
I tried to rewrite The Waste Land. The canon’s reach
casts ruinous light. The masters’ pens breach

I will not grace you with a name...Even “you”, however modest the convention: not here.
No need here for that much presence. Let “you” be “she”, and let the choice, incidentally,
be dictated not by bitterness or fear—a discretion, simply, the most inoffensive decorum.

A single pant leg dangles from the chair. 
Mud from the hem leaves graves on the floor.
Crescent moon: the last button 

Half Border Collie, Half Black Strip.

Ruined. That's it. That makes the whole damn roll.

 
It's a sunset. In warm, declining light,

It’s an awesome thing, when fate takes you at your word 
at eighteen or twenty. If Dreams weren’t greater than Action. . . 
Happiness on this earth! One has to be pretty vulgar 

Did you love her? I thought about her
continuously for a year. There were whole hours
there was nothing too thin about her look, her voice.

What composes a life? Mine comes, too much, from books;
but also the sense that, if you climbed high places,

you would see the streets go on with nothing to end them,