Afternoon darkens into evening. A man falls deeper and deeper into the slow spiral of sleep, into the drift of it, the length of it, through what feels like mist, and comes at last to an open door through which he passes without knowing why, then again without knowing why goes to a room where he sits and waits while the room seems to close around him and the dark is darker than any he has known, and he feels something forming within him without being sure what it is, its hold on him growing, as if a story were about to unfold, in which two characters, Pleasure and Pain, commit the same crime, the one that is his, that he will confess to again and again, until it means nothing.
Mystery and Solitude in Topeka
M
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Psalm 114 by Isaac Watts
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The tribes with cheerful homage own
Their king; and Judah was his throne.
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O living pictures of the dead,
O songs without a sound,
O fellowship whose phantom tread
Hallows a phantom ground—
How in a gleam have these revealed
The faith we had not found.
We have sought God in a cloudy Heaven,
We have passed by God on earth:
His seven sins and his sorrows seven,
His wayworn mood and mirth,
Like a ragged cloak have hid from us
The secret of his birth.
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O fellowship whose phantom tread
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Late, late yestreen I saw the new Moon,
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And I fear, I fear, my Master dear!
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I lay down under language
it left me and I slept
—You, the Comforter, came into the room
my blood, my mouth
all buttoned away—
Makers of houses, books, clothes-
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I Archipelagoes
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