The Solution, For Those Who Care To Know, Is To Suffer More
The world stops, or begins to stop. You can feel it:
a low insomniac grinding, vague tremblings in eyesockets,
nauseous losses of momentum, jostlings of uprightness, the straining
inclination futureward. Things get thrown
into space, as if to lighten the load
might help, but this is the world stopping, not the globe.
Luckily there comes a sound
like a sigh--say the sigh
of a waitress bringing an order
back, sighing as gently as
the meat cooling, indistinguishably
as the secretarial sigh that goes with
papers being shifted from folder to folder
carefully so as not to make someone else’s mistake
make others, or the mothering sigh
in bed beside a child while it learns its way
to sleep--almost silent. It is the sound
of the night wind, rounding along, releasing, unfolding, no one
alerted to the permanence of its direction, that stray wind
which nothing can avert from having its way, soft like love
given, returning because it has been forgotten.
The world starts, or at least begins to start.
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