Nice spring day off big white cloud
At Inspiration Point escaping time wars
Poet takes book & wine bottle up into Mist Mountains

Since only available agenda is rhyming with silence
Seeking window of opportunity on a wall
I disguise what I have to say by sounding Chinese

Such as stars are now darker and farther away
They take deeper drinks because space is
Drying out afraid to think own thoughts

a sower walks into the great hall
it's war out there, he says
and you awash in emptiness
you've sworn off your duty to sound the alarm
I've come in the name of fields
it's war out there

I walk out from that great hall
all four directions a boundless harvest scene
I start planning for war
rehearsing death
and the crops I burn
send up the wolf-smoke of warning fires

but something haunts me furiously:
he's sowing seed across marble floors

Never the bark and abalone mask
cracked by storms of a mastering god,
never the gods’ favored glamour, never
the pelagic messenger bearing orchards
in its beak, never allegory, not wisdom
or valor or cunning, much less hunger
demanding vigilance, industry, invention,
or the instinct to claim some small rise
above the plain and from there to assert
the song of another day ending;
lentil brown, uncounted, overlooked
in the clamorous public of the flock
so unlikely to be noticed here by arrivals,

Is this a dagger which I see before me,
The handle toward my hand? Come, let me clutch thee.
I have thee not, and yet I see thee still.
Art thou not, fatal vision, sensible
To feeling as to sight? or art thou but
A dagger of the mind, a false creation,
Proceeding from the heat-oppressed brain?
I see thee yet, in form as palpable
As this which now I draw.
Thou marshall'st me the way that I was going;
And such an instrument I was to use.
Mine eyes are made the fools o' the other senses,