Time Is A Dream ... A Destroying

You Know, Without My Telling You, How Sometimes A Word Or Name Eludes You, And You Seek It Through Running Ghosts Of Shadow -- Leaping At It, Lying In Wait For It To Spring Upon It, Spreading Faint Snares For It Of Sense Or Sound: Until, Of A Sudden, As If In A Phantom Forest, You Hear It, See It Flash Among The Branches, And Scarcely Knowing How, Suddenly Have It.

I Compelled Myself All Through To Write An Exercise In Verse, In A Different Form, Every Day Of The Year. I Turned Out My Page Every Day, Of Some Sort - I Mean I Didn't Give A Damn About The Meaning, I Just Wanted To Master The Form - All The Way From Free Verse, Walt Whitman, To The Most Elaborate Of Villanelles And Ballad Forms. Very Good Training. I've Always Told Everybody Who Has Ever Come To Me That I Thought That Was The First Thing To Do.

It Is Moonlight. Alone In The Silence I Ascend My Stairs Once More, While Waves Remote In Pale Blue Starlight Crash On A White Sand Shore. It Is Moonlight. The Garden Is Silent. I Stand In My Room Alone. Across My Wall, From The Far-off Moon, A Rain Of Fire Is Thrown. There Are Houses Hanging Above The Stars, And Stars Hung Under The Sea, And A Wind From The Long Blue Vault Of Time Waves My Curtains For Me. I Wait In The Dark Once More, Swung Between Space And Space: Before The Mirror I Lift My Hands And Face My Remembered Face.

Should I Not Hear, As I Lie Down In Dust, The Horns Of Glory Blowing Above My Burial?

We Were All Born Of Flesh, In A Flare Of Pain. We Do Not Remember The Red Roots Whence We Rose, But We Know That We Rose And Walked, That After A While We Shall Lie Down Again.