Classic Poem

Simply, one must imagine what has been lost;
The light along the edge of the lake gone dark

As death, leftover leaves
Crumbled into mulch and ground

Underfoot, a cry
Like a bird's or a child's, imprinting the waxsoft sky

With its echo, mind with memory —
Lost, lost. One must imagine

What has been, what has been lost
Between the third line and the fifth

Between the first page and the third
Between the third envelope and the fifth

With its official Recommande .
And night eats up the flowers of the day.

One must imagine what has been
Lost in the mouth of the censor

Swallowed
Shat from the bowels of the censor

And lost. Lost. Perhaps one lives somewhere which is not
Where the one whom that one loves lives,

And then one must imagine the shortest distance
Between these two points

A line,
Deleted.

Perhaps one whom one has loved in August
Is forbidden to write in November, and his words appear at night

Like stars in the dome of the brain's planetarium.
Or perhaps it is still later, and the scene shifts

As scenes do,
Wordlessly.

The mind drops heavily into sleep, the undersides of the lids
Are painted with bright, moving pictures —

We are dancing a minuet in the mind.
The great gate strains against its lock in the noisy night wind.

The lake's blackness is rolling over and under its winking whiteness
And the lights in the mansion glow like white-gold winter stars.

Simply, there is a storm picking up and strewing all things before it like confetti
And words are scattered into silence like frightened animals, lost,

And love and friendship are separated, lost,
Summer has become the orphan of the seasons, abandoned, lost,

And music is drowned on the wind.

We are dancing a minuet in the mind.
One must imagine.