The Lack of Repose

 

A young man seated at his table

 Holds in his hand a book you have never written

Staring at the secretions of the words as

They reveal themselves.

 It is not midnight. It is mid-day,

The young man is well-disclosed, one of the gang,

Andrew Jackson Something. But this book

Is a cloud in which a voice mumbles.

It is a ghost that inhabits a cloud,

 But a ghost for Andrew, not lean, catarrhal

And pallid. It is the grandfather he liked,

With an understanding compounded by death.

 And the associations beyond death, even if only

Time. What a thing it is to believe that

One understands, in the intense disclosures

Of a parent in the French sense. 

 And not yet to have written a book in which

One is already a grandfather and to have put there

A few sounds of meaning, a momentary end

To the complication, is good, is a good.

--Wallace Stevens