Yet the enchainment of past and future
Woven in the weakness of the changing body,
Protects mankind from heaven and damnation
Which flesh cannot endure.
                                                                Time past and time future

Where mere inches from their opposite warmth and wealth abound
Where with hot tea and amber whisky we remember
A hot humid summer when our disagreements bound us
Found us returning to argue finally to listen even occasionally hear
                                                                Patterns received and repeated

By a grace of sense, a white light still and moving,
Erhebung without motion, concentration
Without elimination, both a new world
And the old made explicit, understood
In the completion of its partial ecstasy,
The resolution of its partial horror.

“… not from the world of truthfulness but from the babble of literary gossip –
there is no truth in it at all.”
But they rejected his clarification preferring citation to creation.
It begins to snow: a fine dust swift becoming a white wet whirling shower
We lean into the squall shouting some but finally silenced by the storm
Until soaked and nearly numb you lead me into the Four Seasons

I can only say, there we have been: but I cannot say where.
And I cannot say, how long, for that is to place it in time.
The inner freedom from the practical desire,
The release from action and suffering, release from the inner
And the outer compulsion, yet surrounded

Affirms their current contention oblivious to an alternate proposition
And while permutation is welcome perverse confiscation is not.
Did you read Philip Roth’s open letter to Wikipedia I ask
(You were out of town) He wanted to correct an entry claiming
For a story he had authored a context which he explained, emerged

Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor towards,
Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point,
There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.

Happily expanding on how and why gently you bring us back to me
Asking how it is I see and can say what others do not
For regardless of your form or function most find whatever

At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless;
Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is,
But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity,

Shifting the subject to your art I say what I see
                           Exactly
                           You agree

In light upon the figured leaf
And hear upon the sodden floor
Below, the boarhound and the boar
Pursue their pattern as before
But reconciled among the stars.

Our talk as empty as the tree
Though there is I suppose opportunity
You ask about me but I am not
Ready to say may not even know
Where I am today

The dance along the artery
The circulation of the lymph
Are figured in the drift of stars
Ascend to summer in the tree
We move above the moving tree

Of an abundant season shared
Not so long ago.
You are troubled I am tired
It is bone-chilling cold
Daffodils bend in obeisance