"I see the man I am and the man who returns;
I’ve read his life in Herodotus;
he speaks Aramaic, Sanskrit, Swedish.

He’s nearsighted, dense, highly internal;
he wanders streets that descend
till the horizon dissolves him.

I know his deaths in the Bosporus,
the great tombs on Crete,
his sobs in a dim stoop
for a woman dead from the plague.

He visits every last house on earth;
he trades pain for camaraderie,
loathing for innocence,
and nightly approaches my lamp
with his pen, so the clouds dawn
nearer my patio’s center,
nearer the world that awaits."

Warning