Outdoors at Summer's End

"And if a Pearl in a Toad's Head may Dwell..."
(-Bunyan)

Two strong Puerto Rican boys are by themselves in the grass, a gay couple enthralled by one another's presence.

Line from bone. Flesh in sway to gravitation. Indication of structure. Symptom of chordate life.
An animal that has a soul.
A thought invisible in the sun.
Photographers stalk, prowl, hang back. They record this and that.
Animals that think. They're deciders: on what to frame, isolate, and share, or on what outfit to present and what physical bearing, and they go out and you see them and we're all together, and we could do anything if we knew we would be happy, but who would listen to me, and why do I make problems for myself, and what is the best way to get strong enough to plan, and how can I go through with it.

I ask, "HOW CAN I BRING MYSELF".

In the self, there is a lightless pool. I fall in, and there listen for the sounds of saints haunting. Their speech and their aspect--one to another of my clamoring selves--is cold (without the heat of friendship) and dim (without the light of wisdom). It takes place in the dream that the woke self turns blind eyes to: the incessant dream of the dreaming self, an animal that lives inside me like a coiled crab in a moon snail shell.

All day inside there's envy and lust for violence, and all night strange attractions to ideas and to the shapes of unfamiliar women. Without real hope to, the dreaming self chews on the prospect of getting to see God, or else some comprehensive library, or some just society where it can shut itself away in the open like a speechless statue. I guess: a drape thrown over the physical being, a beautiful covering of great worth and skill. I guess: a thing you would see and sigh over, saying, 'This is the most accurate portrayal of the man.'

Cloaked with wrought art and speechless as in a sarcophagus. Meanwhile the light of the present world bends the same over everyone in the grass, and over passing ships on the river, and ugly cars and tall buildings and passing fictions. Rhythm is all: a tide, a lunar sympathy, with others. A correspondence with inhuman energies that as people we share. The pool of the self being so deep, and the icy center being so familiar; the ancient comforts of the flooded cold cave.

You, too, will sigh someday.